RationalWiki:Saloon bar/Archive452

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Fundie Tactics and More: Argumentum Ad Satanium

It's about that time I bring this up involving the use of religion. This tactic, which I shall call Argumentum ad Satanium, could be an escape hatch and an inverted god of the gaps tactic. When the fundamentalist is presented with a factual argument, the fundamentalist will simply say "Satan did it" or "Satan blinded you" or "You're seeing Satan's illusion" to explain things that contradict their fundamentalist viewpoints. Anything more on this? TheEternalOutsider (talk) 10:02, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

Simply put, it can be that fundamentalist who uses "Satan this, Satan that" to explain things away, before concluding and handwaving that the other party is damned and going to (the Christian) Hell. TheEternalOutsider (talk) 10:03, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

The Rationalwiki articles on various parts of this phenomenon is the didit fallacy and appeal to faith. Broadly speaking, I guess you could probably call these types of arguments a mixture of appeal to tradition (usually) and an argument from authority (a purported supernatural one, sure, but in reality these arguments tend to appeal to the all-too-human beliefs of a religious institution).

I suppose it would be nice to have a term to wrap every single appeal to God/Satan together, given how common this type of fallacy is in countries like the United States (eg *cough* certain Alabama judges of late). BobJohnson (talk) 18:11, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

In Christianity you also have something like "appeal to the fall". Where all the bad things are explained as happening after that. Though I guess you could argue that was a special case of "Argumentum Ad Satanium".Bob^{"Life is short and (insert adjective)"} 21:28, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

I think I remember something else about these fundies. Some Christian fundamentalists (usually missionaries) claim that all places that aren't Christian "belong to Satan" or are "Satan's domain", or that all non-Christians "are blinded by Satan" or "are controlled by Satan". This is very narrow-minded black-and-white conspiratorial thinking. TheEternalOutsider (talk) 06:38, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

Ah, yes, spiritual warfare, a.k.a. "Everything I don't like is demons, so everything must be exorcised!". Why did we take out the wisecracks comparing it to LARPing, again? Luigifan18 (talk) 03:50, 7 March 2024 (UTC)

There is no bloody way this is real.

I've been seeing ads for a game calling itself "Bubble Cash" that advertises itself as allowing people to earn real money by playing a fairly standard pop-and-knock-down-bubbles puzzle shooter. There is no way this isn't some sort of scam. I mean, really, how would it stay in business if it just hands out money?!? And this isn't the first app of its kind I've seen; I've also seen ads for apps that supposedly allow people to make money by playing solitaire. I mean, really, what in the fresh hell is this nonsense?!? Luigifan18 (talk) 20:17, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

Because it is called gambling. You don't 'get paid' [coughs] by playing these games, you 'get paid' winning vs others. You are 'playing' with your own money. No casino is a Ponzi scheme; if there is someone 'winning' [say] £2k it means that a lot of people lost more than £2k. Like say, video poker and slot machines, the game systems will be calibrated to the millimetre to ensure the makers will made a decent % of profit. Thus the old adage; 'the house always wins'. KarmaPolice (talk) 20:42, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

The thing about these gambling apps is that they are unregulated, therefore extremely sketchy. It's frankly amazing that Apple allows this type of crap on their app store -- gambling is normally heavily regulated, scams are illegal, and this type of shit screams "big lawsuit" to me if regulators actually knew about it. BobJohnson (talk) 20:48, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

Gambling apps are basically all scams because they can avoid paying because of a "mistake" ("fat-finger error") but the gambler cannot.[1]

“”Virtually every U.S. sportsbook has similarly open-ended language in its terms and conditions. There’s consensus that bookmakers shouldn’t have to honor bets that take advantage of a “fat finger” input screw-up, such as listing the “over/under” point total of a football game as 500 instead of 50. (In such a case, any bettor would bet on fewer than 500 points being scored for a guaranteed win.) But increasingly, according to a half-dozen people who work with sportsbooks, operators are canceling winning bets that result from murkier types of bookmaking blunders, raising a philosophical debate that’s dividing regulators across the country.

—Danny Funt

Bongolian (talk) 20:54, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

Apparently, it is at least theoretically possible to 'win cash' without a 'real money' stake. However, it appears you have to be both lucky and very patient to slowly grind your way through salami-slicing, then hoping the site owner actually allows to withdraw it in the end. I suspect you'd get a better RoR from picking up abandoned pennies from town centres. KarmaPolice (talk) 21:05, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

Seriously, though, how do these games run ads, let alone exist, without somebody who's better at writing strongly worded letters to their senator than me calling them out on being blatantly too good to be true?!? Luigifan18 (talk) 22:34, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

Neoliberal deregulation to 'improve competitiveness', said regulators being in the pockets of the folks they're regulating, a Law/Order setup overwhelmed with fighting the War On Drugs to chase after any 'white collar' illegal activities and a political scene corrupted by corp interests. KarmaPolice (talk) 23:26, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

With the betting shop, lottery tickets, scratch cards, slot machines and casinos you can see who you are dealing with - with the websites you do not. Anna Livia (talk) 10:56, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

End of an Era

Rooster Teeth is shutting down.

RT got its start making Machinima, specifically Red vs Blue. The group grew and grew, adding new shows, getting absorbed by Warner Bros, but unable to turn a profit. So WB decided to pull the plug once and for all. 01:33, 7 March 2024 (UTC)

I didn't watch a lot of red v blue but I do remember this being hilarious on early youtube. Torrent (talk) 03:16, 7 March 2024 (UTC)

Salem has won on a technicality in RWBY since a god destroyed the world and allowed her to die. She just didn't expext the god to be named David Zaslav.-Ryan1257 (talk) 17:30, 7 March 2024 (UTC)

Gamergate fans attempt an awful sequel

So for those of you who have lives outside the internet, the capital-G Gamers™ have found a new bogeyman to hate and fear. Sweet Baby Inc. is a consulting firm based out of Canada that specializes in diversity and inclusivity in the video game industry that various angry figures in the Gaming™ community have concluded are actively attempting to force developers and publishers to conform to their "woke agenda." Never mind that this is a consulting firm. Since they helped worked on the recently panned Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League game, geniuses have concluded that this firm is the sole cause of everything bad in the game.

Anyway, its been getting dumber by the day. While the industry goes into a slump as major players keep laying off employees since games aren't making the massive numbers they were hoping for, idiots are going to blame the whole thing on the presence of non-white characters, the occasional LBGT theme and female characters that don't look like flawless sex goddess. And now they found the right bogeyman to blame for everything. Asshole YouTubers and bloggers keep pushing the story, the conspiracy minded are digging through posts and the like to label anyone at the company as "anti-white bigots", nonsense about ESG scores go around, people make blacklists, etc.. I can only hope this fizzles out before things get worse. Paul S (talk) 19:01, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

So, Sweet Baby Inc. only worked or are working on... 12 games. Whee.

I will grant that when I picture "consulting firm" and "creative arts" together, I instantly picture corporate blah (why the fuck do you need a consulting firm to target an audience of wide breadth?). But what's up with this Woke Derangement Syndrome infecting certain men, often with a healthy dose of the most cartoonish masochism one can find? And why do so many gamers continue to reinforce the stereotype of themselves as basement dwellers who are deathly afraid of any actual flesh-and-blood female? (Read: *not* one that's sexed up to all get-go, as if in shitty exploitation trash cinema that basement dwellers used to rent from the Blockbuster back in the day?) BobJohnson (talk) 19:26, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

Past a point, it's like, why the fuck do you even care? Do you have nothing else going on in your life? There's games and stories I don't like, but I don't spend all day complaining about them. I just play other games and engage with different stories! IntrepidSkeptic (talk) 03:40, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

B-but they want you to know about this EBIL agenda!!1!1! Arcadium Trancefer (talk) 15:51, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

If you strip out the 'woke capitalism' snarls and similar, the crux of this issue is the dreaded 'cliquey core market kickback against attempts to widen market appeal of goods/services'. That they've basically had the run of the place traditionally, but *gah!* the shop/brand/company is now trying to diversify, usually on the reasonable business case of 'core market past saturation point'. This 'run of the place' can be quite literal in some cases; imagine a 'nerdzone' shop being run by Comic Book Guy mainly as his hangout, which explains the large amounts of anime tits and arses on the walls, the heavy slant of stock towards sub-porno and/or violent graphics and the clutch of terrible-smelling cronies with even worse social skills and waay too much free time on their hands.

As for BobJ's question; often consultants are required to break the internal GroupThink and assumptions in companies. Other times, they are needed to simply repeat what the folks at the coal-face already knew to the Big Suits in a manner which they actually paid attention. Often, merely translating anecdote to market research is enough; from 'as a [non hetro-cis-white-guy] I find CBG's store horrid/creepy/unwelcoming/useless and will never shop there' to 'the average US comic collecter spends $450 a year on their hobby and stats show 45% of these collectors are women, 5% are LGBT guys and another 10% are non-white straight guys. Yet a random sampling showed only 7% of CBG's store was from these groups'. Lastly, and most cynically, it's part of an inclusivity box-checking exercise. KarmaPolice (talk) 19:40, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

A part of me just feels like this is throwing money at a problem that should instead be seen as an opportunity to educate yourself and think more creatively.-Ryan1257 (talk) 20:32, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

'Throwing money at problems' is kinda how the business world works. If X needs doing and all you have on staff are Ys, you go out and hire an X to do it. Yes, you could re-train an Y to do it, but then - who will do the Y while they're training? Plus, often X is only done on an as/when needed basis, which makes it more cost-effective to [in this case] run the storyboards/concepts etc past the consultants than have someone specially trained to do it. KarmaPolice (talk) 20:53, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

Everyone is sick of their shit. I doubt it will be a huge as back in 2014. Ψ (talk) 03:46, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

Help with new userbox.

Could someone help me with this userbox:"Template:User template:User thinks that foxes are the best". I'm haveing a hard time getting a photo and I think I messed up the code. Koafox (talk) 17:21, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

@Koafox did you have a specific image in mind? Pick one from Commons and I'll give it a shot! - Rairyu75 (Talk) 17:57, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

Or perhaps the Latin name will be of more use? - Rairyu75 (Talk) 17:59, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vulpes_vulpes_laying_in_snow.jpg. Koafox (talk) 18:08, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

@Koafox How's it look? If you want something to look different, you can just change one of the parameters and hit "Show preview" to see what it will look like. When you hit edit, you will see #FF5733, that's the hex code for the background colour, if you would like a different one use this website to find the hex code. Or resize the image (the "px" part, just make the number bigger or smaller.) Hope that helps! - Rairyu75 (Talk) 18:28, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

It looks graet!Koafox (talk) 19:01, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

I'm having some problems with adding it. what is the "Example (talk · contribs · block  · rights  · rename) "?Koafox (talk) 19:18, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ @Koafox I think you are using the lowercase? So it should be "Foxes" instead of "foxes". Try and see if that works. - Rairyu75 (Talk) 19:23, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

Thanks, it working now. Koafox (talk) 21:04, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

Hypothetically, if "hyperdimensional" beings incarnating into mystics were true

There's various versions of the belief in "starseeds" and similar, that is, some spirit or powerful entity (in some more fancy New Age metaphysics described as hyperdimensional beings less constrained by dimensions of time along with space) which becomes part of a person incarnated into. This depends on some idea of incarnation, where most belief systems hold that all have some soul or spirit incarnating into them, which in a minority of cases may be an unusual spiritual being. Some teachings more like the Fourth Way however allow for many lacking such, and only some persons having much of anything incarnating into them – a series of worlds existing in the manner of concentric circles bound by differing numbers of cosmic laws, and conscious beings possibly taking on such nested structures as well if something "higher" "incarnates" or functionally melds with something "lower" and takes it over. I.e., incarnation = a "positive" form of possession, if the physical body can live on its own. (Some esoteric Christians by contrast take a dim view on rare "powerful" spiritual persons, whom they view as incarnations of fallen angels.)

Anyway, what would hypothetical super-beings do if they worked through people? And what would be the point if they're totally out of this world and categorically very very different? Here's some thoughts going a little in a sci-fi direction. Any other ideas in a similar vein?

We'll look past New Age cliches in which they just feel a little different and everyone is one. We'll also discard the claims of cult leaders who claim to be special and that the fate of the world depends on them, while all they do is spread formulaic B.S. There's also traditional religious ideas that aren't very useful to consider. So what else?

Something I haven't seen others suggest yet is that such beings could be a little like demo scene programmers who're part of some retro-computing club. They may take on the challenge of, "how much can you do with a mere human brain?" As a result, the persons may end up both peculiar and accomplishing strange mental feats, whether or not that's shared with the people around them (maybe they'd be rather reserved in their communication to avoid messing up their social lives, unless they've planned to "go crazy"). Likely all manner of brain quirks and capabilities would end up used in nonstandard ways, which, if such people and their work could be studied carefully, may lead to recognizing some patterns analogous to quirks in results from computer algorithms that try to do something a bit more roughly on underpowered hardware.

Another thing that may be attempted is to use the butterfly effect combined with hyperdimensional awareness in order to reshape world history with the most minimal action possible. It could make an interesting game. Maybe such a person would say or do something very simple at a very specific time in a specific circumstance, maybe simply be present and cause another person to respond or walk in a slightly different fashion, the tiniest difference with well-chosen parameters ending up drastically changing the trajectory of history. But it may be tricky for them if several of them compete with different designs for the timeline. Then it may all mostly cancel out in the end. --ApooftGnegiol (talk) 03:50, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

What... Gang O' Shadow Wizards 🧙‍♂️^{Bore me} 19:02, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

This reminds me of something I read on TV Tropes…

“”D'ye think we 'mighty ones' are blind? Do we not watch each other, and guess at what each is doing, and reach out and do some little thing that hampers the aims of another great and mighty? We'll never be free of this problem, and that's a good thing. I would cower at the thought of living in any Faerûn where all the mighty and powerful folk agreed perfectly on everything. That's the way of slavery and shackles and armed tyranny... and if ye'd like to win a bet, wager that ye'll be near the bottom of any such order.

—Elminster

…And there you have it. Luigifan18 (talk) 19:59, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

if you've been taking psychedelics, I wouldn't suggest regular use. I mean It took me years without to confidently re-center as less than a vessel and more than nobody. I know the feeling of being a less than effective portal of something I am positive I noticed but can't accurately describe. In the shit, it was for myself to try to describe them accurately, and really important to myself that something outside of me was threading through me, outside of time, and I did not exactly appreciate of all the things I can do as the things I, myself, can do. Torrent (talk) 07:29, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

I don't have very many good ideas about possible motivations of such "higher beings", I admit. And if you think of many conflicting ones, then it can become a lot like that fiction trope. Some fringe ideas even use "many conflicting agendas" as an explanation for why there's no evidence of anything big and unexplained going on -- it's all just too mixed up, so it looks like nothing or randomness. Other fringe ideas by contrast go that no matter how mixed up it is, on the whole there's plenty of evidence of evil and strangeness and things leading to imminent apocalyptic doom. Arkadiusz Jadczyk represents both, suggesting that maybe there's psychic messages beamed back from many possible futures, resulting in a combined noise difficult to distinguish from a lack of signal here in the present, while of course real, good channeling like that of his wife tuning into it contains accurate messages warning of great dangers and more.

The optimistic New Age hippie version has some other issues. All manner of "good forces" are allegedly working through various special individuals towards... what, exactly? Imminent transformation of the world leading to new ages, in the vein of many a failed prediction? Just being "uplifting" and "positive" while partaking in teachings that have negative consequences for people because they teach being neglectful of the reality of situations? Sitting around navel-gazing at length, leading to stagnation or worse (opening the door for pessimistic mystics who think the real situation is that malevolent or mischievous entities are playing with people for the lulz)? Or maybe just giving a progressive nudge furthering human cultural development, which may suggest that people like Carl Sagan are the real "lightworkers" acting as vessels for such spirits?

I have yet to try any psychedelics, but I think my thoughts may be far-out enough at times without it. But from what I've read, I don't get anywhere near as spectacular special effects accompanying strange things in my inner world, even during the weirdest times like a breakdown some years ago. Also, even then, I had this strange drawn-out "reductio ad absurdum" playing out in my inner world -- becoming submerged in a weird inner story with suspension of disbelief, then it got more and more absurd until I could no longer believe in it. It all started with a message from myself to myself telling myself that I had "learned too much" and needed to leave a cult-like group behind. Over time I became more and more of a skeptic. --ApooftGnegiol (talk) 20:43, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

I think you're doing two things wrong. One, you're talking about your religious understanding as if we've all been there. I promise you, if your claim that you left a cult is true, NOBODY has any idea what you are talking about. Second, you're not questioning your beliefs, just your leaders. And so with those two criticisms in mind, I ask you, the fuck are you even talking about? I'm trying to get it, really I am, but seriously, it reads like you are just making shit up. Torrent (talk) 06:50, 29 February 2024 (UTC)

I don't understand your claim that I'm not questioning my beliefs. Above, if you can parse the text at all, I'm listing a bunch of things that I do not believe in (in the first post and the second, except when describing experiences). Unless you mean I should start believing, instead of doing a mix of playing with and questioning ideas -- which I doubt. Obviously I failed to get across that the entire point of this thread is to play around with those ideas and point to the absurd, and try to take them in a more sci-fi direction, and see what interesting ideas may arise. I think it could make for interesting fiction elements if broken apart and reformulated more extensively.

Maybe nothing comes across. I'm not sure in that case if it's worthwhile to try to get anything across. I've tried to write about more general and broader ideas than those specifically only of the cult, though perhaps the effort is not enough. The ideas I'm referring to would be at least roughly familiar to people who've read about at least the outline of any of a set of related teachings, a subset of New Age cosmology and beliefs which range from more hippie-like versions (the middle paragraph in my previous post) to more paranoid and conspiracy-centered millennial doomer versions (the first paragraph in my previous post). The more I've read in recent years, the more I've seen similarities in teachings and ideas -- how beneath the surface, all kinds of supposedly opposed teachings are very much alike. Maybe that's impenetrable to those who haven't read a whole lot, though. I didn't think so, as skeptics have seemed to recognize similarities much more readily than believers. --ApooftGnegiol (talk) 04:08, 3 March 2024 (UTC)

All you have said was 'I'm playing with science fiction from my experience here.' What should I have read? Torrent (talk) 05:18, 3 March 2024 (UTC)

Not "from my experience", unless you purely mean experience with ideas. I'm referring to general ideas.

Well, I linked the "starseed" article at the top of this thread. Beyond that, there's many places you could find references to New Age beliefs in people holding "vibrations", or alternatively mechanisms of consciousness woo, being the way to transform the world -- the way to bring about a "New Age" according to presumably a majority of New Age hippies. The general idea is, people who are special spirits have specially powerful roles in such passive "activism". You'll find that in countless New Age messages. If you want one weird example, you can try this one.

To get my joke about Carl Sagan being a more likely candidate for a special "lightworker" than the kind of people New Agers and conspiritualists view as the people here to change the world, you'd need to think about a few facts of his life. He's a CSICOP guy and historical adversary of UFO-alien and paranormal movements, and generally viewed by cranks as an example of a narrow-minded materialistic "establishment" figure. I also mentioned briefly why I think various New Age beliefs are bogus, in that paragraph with the joke -- hence motivating why someone like Sagan is a better fit. --ApooftGnegiol (talk) 14:16, 3 March 2024 (UTC)

New age is such an old broad way of talking about it, I agree, it's for me hard to see Pixies labeled classic rock. I am familiar with starseed grifts from 2009. I am glad we are on some page, but also I would like to ask what parameters being a star seed would require, because there is a chance I am star seed.Torrent (talk) 04:03, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

Two actual facts about my birth, one: I was born with my umbilical cord wrapped around my neck, and I was not resuscitated in the room. Two: A baby girl was brought to my mother, who protested because my mother had a blue wristband, and the baby had a pink wristband. Three: I kinda look exactly my mom and dad mashed up. I have been met by the sleep paralysis demon. I guess I want to know, why your seed?Torrent (talk) 04:33, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ The specific term "starseed" isn't so important; it's one of several related, rather similar ideas. (Basically, every few years there's another grift with somewhat different wording and imagery, but otherwise the same. And old ones linger.) As RW's article on the topic indicates, if you feel like you're such a person, then sure. That's how all the believers do anyway. But if you actually tried to think of what the implications would be if it were true -- then teachings and claims diverse. Some in practice limit the whole meaning to personal feels, and explain it all by whatever feels right for them to believe in at the moment. There's also more striking claims of abilities or other things that set the spiritually "special" people apart from the majority -- and here we actually get some ideas that could sometimes be seriously tested (a la James Randi), though sometimes they're formulated in unfalsifiable terms.

I was more interested in the later thing mentioned: if it all were true that some are very different, and have natures distinctly transcending human limitations or other qualities in some ways, then what? Though every teacher and cult and idiosyncratic believer has their own specific ideas and claims here. So you'd need to select among it all and pick some range of ideas. Like at the beginning of this thread, I tried to filter it and focus more on weird people with sci-fi roles and capabilities. --DrApooftGnegiol (talk) 07:55, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

I took some time, and I think you'd be a fan of Neil Gaiman, who I get, or David Lynch, who I fully do not get. But I fully disagree INSOFAR that coincidence or weirdness is supernatural. If you pay an interest enough diligence, it can look like expertise. I can't claim to be an expert in debunking starseed. But the premise is a little silly if I can be a candidate. I spent a lot of time attempting lucid dreaming and have been a little successful. It's work, you have to sleep when you aren't tired. Paying attention while dreaming and remembering dreams isn't supernatural. Building some kind of space force by argument you've written 'The Orville' which is the least funny sci fi 'but we're only kinda joking, Next Generation stole all the ideas decades ago.' Torrent (talk) 07:14, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Essay Update: Nightmare Situation

Just want to drop in and share that I have added a scenario to my essay. Just my thought process for a terrifying bastardization of the US at the hands of the GOP should they win. TheEternalOutsider (talk) 11:05, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

Bernie Sanders is a gigachad.

Not much else to say that hasn't been said already. Luigifan18 (talk) 15:34, 7 March 2024 (UTC)

Make sure you FUCKING VOTE and make sure you get as many as people as possible to FUCKING VOTE, too. This means nothing if we don't win. IntrepidSkeptic (talk) 03:19, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

Oh great it's that season again where Americans become extra obnoxious about which shade of racism is preferable. - Only Sort of Dumb (talk) 03:37, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

Better to vote for the guy who wants 9 concentration camps rather than 10, so yes, the lesser shade of racism is absolutely preferable. Plus if the US goes down, they're taking a lot of countries with it. I don't want that and I presume you don't want that. IntrepidSkeptic (talk) 06:15, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

That is not the winning argument you think it is, Jesus Christ. You don’t think they would simply make the 9 camps more populated in your analogy? - Only Sort of Dumb (talk) 09:50, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

What kind of bullshit balance fallacy is this? Since it's *extremely* easy to come up with examples of Donald Trump's racism (all the way back to his New York days), I really want to see what "shade of racism" you have in mind for Joe Biden.

(And knock it with the "concentration camp" bullshit too, that's hyperbole, even when talking about the immigrant detention scenario IMHO. Trump's rhetoric here IMHO is the only point of contention in this direction.) BobJohnson (talk) 14:03, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

I think it's better put using the 'bus analogy'; which driver [Trump or Biden] is gonna be driving closer to your ideal destination? Doing the 'they're as bad as each other' riff [when it plainly is incorrect] is de facto helping Trump because it will depress the Biden vote. Sure, Biden [like Starmer here in the UK] are really not that appetising from a left-wing POV [be it socialist or progressive] but we have to get it into people's heads that 'if we do not hang together we will be hung separately' - in the American case, 'hanging together' to defend the rule of law, democracy, the Constitution, Bill of Rights etc. KarmaPolice (talk) 14:29, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

1) The Biden administration has been directly criticized by human rights organizations for its continuation of Trump-era asylum policies. The conditions at the camps where asylum seekers are concentrated at continue to be a travesty of human rights under Biden (as well as the fact that these camps exist in the first place), so the criticism that Biden hasn't substantially changed course from Biden on asylum policy is a valid criticism.

2) Whether or not the concentration of human beings into literal camps is "hyperbole" or not is a subjective assessment. How exactly do you define a concentration camp? As a camp that literally concentrates humans together as part of a process of otherization, and there is certainly otherization aplenty about the people in those camps, or is genocidal intent a required factor for a concentration camp to be a concentration camp? Were the Boer War concentration camps not concentration camps then? What about Camp Anderson during the American Civil War? Was that a concentration camp, or a "detention center for Union POWs"? Since apparently we can arbitrarily exclude concentration camps from the label when it offends our political sensibilities now. Carthage (talk) 18:03, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

From what little I've picked up on this topic, I get the suspicion that ICE to some extent has 'gone rogue' and private subcontracting [who I understand run many of these internment/deportation camps] has always had a critical flaw that it creates another layer/buffer, which means the 'chain of command' is longer and the lever-ropes slacker [as cross-org command is a lot harder to do right]. Running off this, I will lay out the theory Biden's biggest crime here was not taking ICE 'in hand' and giving it a clear-out of Trump-era officials [I've been around far too long to know mid-managers doing passive-aggressive stalling etc is a sure-fire way of wrecking an 'unwanted' policy].

Anyway, this is a key issue which every advanced nation is grappling with right now - how welcoming should 'we' be to economic migrants, and what do we do with the folks we have found 'undocumented' within our borders? KarmaPolice (talk) 18:50, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

As I've said before, the easy solution to reduce the load and issues with all these asylum seekers is simple: enforce illegal immigration employment laws at the CEO level. You're the boss who hires illegals for that construction project or lettuce picking? Throw them in the slammer for a decade or two. I'll guarantee that will dry up the jobs available for illegal immigrants, and thus stymie the demand regarding people crossing the border, which usually is driven by some form of seeking a better life (of which "a better job" plays a big role). Now, maybe people aren't going to like the price of lettuce or houses going up that will result, and discussions perhaps could be had about legal immigration programs to help with labor demand (which the illegal-employing bosses won't like one bit because that might involve *gasp!* not mistreating their migrant workers, but never mind). None of this will happen, for (unfortunate) obvious reasons (namely, how much money is sunk into politics by rich business idiots - it's worth noting that a lot of the "illegal employing" industries tend to lean "right-wing" ironically). It's convenient for business to have the white rubes get angry at all the brown people and demand walls that never will be built. That way, the rubes can help vote in the rich idiots' tax breaks.

The main problem for Biden here is that plenty of independent voters, some of which he needs, currently also think that immigration is A Critical Issue. Could he be better on the crap conditions in the migrant camps right now? Absolutely... if it made political sense to, of course, because he's a politician. I would tend to agree with him that it doesn't right now, sadly - he has more to lose by appearing "soft" (read: humane :( ) on immigration than to gain, so the issue is unfortunately "deprioritized". Politics (and humanity) are a river of shit sometimes.

"Concentration camp" by any definition I have seen refers to political prisoners or prisoners who are solely of an oppressed minority group, not refugee / migrant camps. This does not include prisoner of war camps, so Andersonville Prison is not one. The Boer War camps were concentration camps due to the British directly targeting a minority group. Obviously abuse can occur at all three types, but due to well known concentration camps of history there's a bit of a "load" so IMHO one needs to be careful. It's similar how I personally do not call the Israeli actions "genocide"... yet. Even though I think there's enough evidence to say that war crimes are absolutely occurring. (In Israel's case, too, the situation is now getting "uncomfortably close" enough IMHO that I do not consider the "genocide" term pure hyperbole.) BobJohnson (talk) 19:14, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

That's the thing: undocumented people absolutely are marginalized. It's right in the very name: undocumented. It's also no coincidence that most of the people in those camps are Hispanic, and a lot of the anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy is also very conveniently Hispanic-coded. Nobody is calling for newly arrived immigrants from Europe to be rounded up and deported. Carthage (talk) 19:19, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

I think the immigration topic has hit the issue of binary view; that you are either 'hard' [performative cruelty, culture war/anti-crime posturing, outsourcers raking in more cash for overpriced shite] or 'humane' [making a de facto complete 'open door'/unmonitored immigration policy minus public debate]. The idea that [as BobJ alludes to] having a 'firm but fair' policy [cracking down on employers of undocumenteds, having good border controls and deporting criminals etc but also having a decent 'guest worker' policy and a possible 'route to citizenship' for long-term stayers] is apparently impossible. KarmaPolice (talk) 19:43, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

Either way there is a demonstrable merit of systemic racism at play regardless of whether your pick is Biden or Trump. Biden is in fact leaning in on what you call "hard" anti-immigration policy. One of his big talking points right now is that he's "tougher" on border security than the Republicans, who killed the funding bill that also noticeably gave into reactionary demands for "border security." Carthage (talk) 19:47, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

Yeah, I strongly suspect that ICE do use racial profilling in finding targets, along with a nasty % of the native population who shall weaponise the 'hotlines' by calling in 'foreign looking/sounding' folks they don't like in the hope they might be 'illegals' [similar to the benefit fraud hotlines etc here in the UK]. But it is also possible that ICE a) do deport [white] Europeans too but it's not covered so much and/or b) there are simply less white Europeans to deport because of geographic/income/political reasons. KarmaPolice (talk) 20:33, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

The EU guarantees the "right to free movement", so any European in the EU seeking a "better life" in a richer country is simply going to move to a more prosperous EU country.

There's an additional factor here, of course, as seen in this Pew link: [2] Mexico and Central American undocumented immigrants are largely uneducated. European immigrants to the United States in contrast have at least some education (only 11% not high school educated in that Pew link) The top region for where US immigrants have come from over the last several years has actually been Asia. However, the vast majority of Asian immigrants to the US are college-educated, and therefore are probably coming in through one of the legal skilled labor visas. Consequently, there is not as huge of a hoopla. One of the "asterisks" on the immigration issue is that the culture war Sturm und Drang promoted by the populists (which yes, is often quite racist) tends to get muted quite a bit once one starts talking about immigrant doctors, scientists, engineers / computer programmers, and whatnot. BobJohnson (talk) 21:31, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

…How did this become about immigration?!? Luigifan18 (talk) 21:46, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

Blame Dumb for that... anyway, BobJ is 100% correct - which is why a lot of EU 'unskilled' labour comes from it's poorest members [currently Bulgaria/Romania]. We also need to remember that 'poor' is relative; the HDI index for the 'worst' EU member [Bulgaria] is still higher than Mexico's [and they're about average for S American HDI] but even the worst country in Europe [Albania] is also higher too. But even then, we are having to deal with the spectre of mass migration waves from the Mid-East/Africa and our confusion on 'how to deal' is perhaps even worse. KarmaPolice (talk) 23:05, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

Blame me lol. I didn’t use the concentration camp analogy I was calling someone out for using it as an analogy. Carthage seems to be the only who “gets” it as we are circling around the idea that racism is some way negotiable, that the abuse of non-white people can be compartmentalized as acceptable to a matter of degree. There is arguably evidence of a ethnic cleansing happening within the conflict between Gaza and Israel right now, that most members of both parties are more than willing to support. All this really amounts to is whatever shade of racism is preferable to you, what degree of it can you rationalize as acceptable, and what line do you draw to say when it is unacceptable. At the end the day, you are still arguing that is not the case that racism is never acceptable. That is just racism apologia, and making that claim is not a balance fallacy, it is a stance of moral absolutism. - Only Sort of Dumb (talk) 23:43, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

If it makes you feel any better, the concentration camp analogy was something I got from Sam Seder. The point I was making is that anti-electoralist bullshit is deeply harmful and accomplishes absolutely nothing. It's just an excuse not to participate. Yes, Biden sucks, but the alternative is way, way worse. Going "bothsides!" only supports the worse side. IntrepidSkeptic (talk) 01:03, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

There seems to be some devaluation of labor going on here. Are the people who literally keep the lights running "lesser" than "doctors, lawyers, and scientists"? What about janitors, cooks, and mechanics? There is also no such thing as "unskilled" labor. You can't be a cook without some training. Simply labor we arbitrarily value more and labor we arbitrarily value less, often because of classist sentiment. Even if we accept the distinction here, there is no guarantee that racists will accept that skilled labor should be here anymore than unskilled labor. Carthage (talk) 23:53, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

I think we can assume BobJ is aware of this, Carthage; which is why I quoted 'unskilled' [I've done ag work; it's a killer]. But this is how the argument is normally framed; that we have 'good immigrants' [wealthy, without dependents and with lots of formal qualifications] and 'bad immigrants' [poor, with dependents and with few if any formal qualifications]. Covid showed everyone how screwed-up this mentality this was; that a society cannot live long without agri workers, garbage disposal or grocery shelf-stackers, but can minus marketeers, bankers and hedge-fund managers. But there is an argument that 'cheap migrant labour' can also be damaging to the general economy because it retards capital investment and thus, productivity. KarmaPolice (talk) 00:27, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

I find it hard to vote for the guy who supports and defends a genocide of Palestinians in Gaza as well as his support for Trump era policies at the Mexico-USA border. Ψ (talk) 03:20, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

Good thing you don't have to, because Biden supports neither of those. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 04:00, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

And yet Biden has not only continued to fund Israel without condition, he also has continued Trump era border policy. Carthage (talk) 04:05, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

The border situation is, more than anything, Republicans being intransigent on marching orders from the orange menace, as the last couple weeks demonstrated. As to Israel, that's such a Manichaean outlook that it's not worth engaging further. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 04:49, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

Bullshit. The Biden administration has continued Trump era border policies. Last thing I heard the GOP wasn't in control of the White House. Biden is also, again, leaning into racist tropes about "illegals" and border security. As for Israel: I mean it really is simple, isn't it? Genocide is ethically monstrous, no one has the right to commit genocide regardless of the circumstances. Why should my tax dollars go to facilitating genocide? Carthage (talk) 03:41, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

You'll be pleased to know they aren't, then. And you know as well as I about the border bill, and the Republicans do have their dweeb as speaker. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 03:51, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

@IntrepidSkeptic “accomplishes nothing” kind of assumes that the means to which any goal is obtained as it relates to the distribution of socioeconomic power happens at the level of federal elections. That is an empirical falsehood. Civil disobedience, unionization, lobbying, disruptive protest, municipal elections, revolution, times of crises, platforming, mutual aid organizing, boycotting etc. can all lead to something being accomplished in one form or another, and historically all of these things have been used or resulted in some modicum of social change, both big and small. Voting as harm reduction is not effective if that is all that is being done, especially when the figures that are being voted for have a historical relationship in supporting the policies that created a number of the systematic problems that dominant our discourse to begin with. - Only Sort of Dumb (talk) 06:08, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

Why do you act like it's an either/or? You can do all that and vote for the least bad of a set of bad options. At this point, I'm wondering if you're just trolling because you sound like a stereotypical tankie. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIwkFL3ba3g IntrepidSkeptic (talk) 06:15, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

I argued earlier that voting in racists and defending said act is defending racism. It just so also happens to be a matter of fact that both parties have a pretty awful history of establishing racist policies in the US, and both of the most popular candidates have a history of contributing to racist policies or acting personally racist themselves. I never said at any point that you should never vote, I never praised communism or defended Stalin, and I even brought up voting in municipal elections as a means of "getting things accomplished" over voting in federal elections. "Least bad" is still bad, and when you work to make bad things happen, even if they are worse things you can do....you are doing something bad. If absolute anti-racism is your standard for tankie, then being anti-tankie is simply being a little comfy with some racism. I think that is a bad analysis of the term. - Only Sort of Dumb (talk) 08:01, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

Yeah nothing screams "I am not racist" then jumping to concentration camp analogies that imply 9 concentration camps is an acceptable number over 10, and linking a white youtuber famous for saying the n-word and sicking his fans on black creators he doesn't like. - Only Sort of Dumb (talk) 08:04, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

So, do you realize that if Biden isn't elected, Trump will taken power? Do you realize we likely won't get another election past that? I really hope this anti-electoralist nonsense you're spewing doesn't end with death camps, because not voting sure didn't save the Jehovah's Witnesses. I said you sound like a stereotypical tankie because they make these sorts of dumb arguments in favor of enabling fascism via anti-electoralism rather than working against it through all means available. What did you hope to accomplish by whining about Americans caring about elections in response to what I said in the first place?

Look, you're not a badass South Park character or Chapo Trap House host for acting above it all, you're just enabling the worse side. You're not going to accomplish anything by whining about people who do actually care about where the country goes past the election. I got the concentration camp analogy from Sam Seder making the same argument. (I don't like using this card, but if the idpol game helps you understand at all, Seder's Jewish.) Have you even looked at Project 2025? Vaush dropped the tactical n-word to make a point to some stupid Nazis very early in his career. He's stated, repeatedly, that it was a mistake and poorly thought out. Plus being white doesn't mean he can't disagree with Professor Flowers when she makes a dumb argument. That's not siccing his fans on anyone, and if you want to claim that, I want some actual proof.

I really don't care if you think I'm a racist, because you've already demonstrated your lack of critical analysis. If you genuinely believe picking the best of a set of bad options somehow makes you worse than refusing to participate, thus enabling the worst possible option, you're not someone whose judgment I particularly value. I want to get the best available outcome, not be the smuggest asshole in the death camp. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXZw9vrsAgA Here's the full context of all the disinformation you've clearly been fed already. IntrepidSkeptic (talk) 09:35, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

You say all of this as if there is a social determinism to this, when there isn’t really one. It’s not entirely clear if Trump can legally run for the presidency anymore, and you’re in a lot of ways assuming that a currently *hypothetical* electoral candidate on election night will respect the democratic process if he loses, and his cult of followers aren’t willing to act collectively against it regardless. To talk about enabling “fascism” when the US will be actively funding a massive ethnic displacement campaign involving the mass murder of women and children is a fucking joke. You don’t care about “not enabling fascism” you only care about not “enabling” a fascism that will personally be a threat to you! That’s not anti-fascism. That’s selfishness. Speaking of anti-fascism, why is civil disobedience not the table for you if the stakes are so high? Why is electoralism being assumed the most effective here, and not engaging in some form against Donald Trumps person in the form of direct action? This is a physical person, he is not invulnerable, not physically, not economically, and yes not politically. There are multitudes of possible actions that can be done here to prevent Trump from taking office. We know as hell for sure his followers sure are willing act extremely based on the seeming rationalization of conspiracy theory. If what you are worried about is true, what are you willing to do besides voting in a liberal contributor to what may very well constitutes a genocide in Gaza? - Only Sort of Dumb (talk) 19:52, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

If I lack “critical analysis” then someone made a poor decision accepting me into a masters program in philosophy. I am the one presenting my own reasoned argument here, not regurgitating something that sounded appealing to my pre-formed judgements from youtube. You make these wild leaps to form ad hominems to call me a “tankie” or a “south park” character (I fucking hate that show), but let’s be honest here you have no fucking idea what my politics are or where I come from. You are desperately looking for a box to put me in, but I will tell yeah there isn’t a box that I fit neatly into. Pigeonholing me doesn’t make your arguments any stronger, or your assumptions any less problematic. - Only Sort of Dumb (talk) 20:01, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

If the Supreme Court is the final arbiter of law, what makes you think they'll be the ones to stop Trump? They sure haven't thus far. Of course he won't respect the democratic process - see January 6th - but that's not an argument to simply allow him to seize power. In every way Biden is bad, Trump is way, way worse. I don't know why you're having so much trouble understanding this. It's really not that complicated. As I've already said, it's not an either/or. You can do all of that and vote. Why do you find this so difficult to understand? Though, if you're suggesting someone should straight-up assassinate Trump yet not vote against him, that's pretty insane.

You're not even addressing my actual arguments, rather, you're just trying to paint me as a hypocrite somehow for taking the best of a set of bad options. I don't care about your master's program in philosophy, that doesn't change the fact that you're presenting really bad anti-electoralist arguments. You came up with them for yourself, cool, they're still really bad. If you hate South Park, stop acting like a character from there. I'm judging you solely from the poor reasoning you've shown here. There is absolutely no value in being the smuggest asshole in the death camp, there is value in preventing the worst case scenario. IntrepidSkeptic (talk) 21:51, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

I have a quick question: when was a fascist movement ever defeated through electoral means alone? Carthage (talk) 02:05, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

Depends on how you define defeated. I would certainly say there's more utility on voting against a fascist movement than to not vote. As of yet, the American Nazi party hasn't taken electoral power. They're willing to use the democratic process to dismantle the democratic process, so we must use the democratic process to defend the democratic process. Besides, as I have repeatedly said, it's not an either/or. You vote and you keep doing everything else. IntrepidSkeptic (talk) 02:35, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

I don’t know how the suggestion that if the stakes are high enough, direct civilly disobedient action against Trump is warranted, results in “simply letting Trump seize power”. That’s just an obvious strawman fallacy to suggest I ever argued that Trump should be allowed to win. I also don’t understand why this dynamic is one directional. Why is not voting for Biden a vote for Trump, but not voting for Trump is never a vote for Biden? Why is the relation asymmetric? I don’t think you really have any evidence to your credibility to even assess the quality of reasoning. You haven’t really addressed my criticism at all. You are taking it that anti-racist action can be coupled with a conceit of supporting racist politicians, regardless if there are worse politicians (which isn’t being denied), there is something deeply problematic about making concessions to racism. You can’t avoid the implication that a lot of these argument’s amount to tolerating some degree of bigotry, or actors who contributed to the social inequalities we see today. I don’t accept utilitarian reasoning precisely because it hinges upon throwing minorities under the bus if it means supporting some “greater good”. It is a moral theory that has always had a problem of being incompatible with the notion of justice. Lesser evil, is still evil. You haven’t even demonstrated how you know that come election night the race is going to be between Biden and Trump. We are not even there yet. - Only Sort of Dumb (talk) 03:21, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

Once again, it's not an either/or. You vote for Biden and you do everything else. Trump is a threat to the democratic process entirely and if he's elected, we may never even have another election. Biden is not, but he's the only other candidate with a realistic chance of defeating Trump - there's the asymmetry. Everything Biden is bad on, Trump is worse on. Do you seriously think the election has any chance of being anything other than Biden vs. Trump? Seriously? Nor do I think the Grand Socialist Revolution is right around the corner - you can hold those delusions, just like a Christian, but I prefer to operate in the real world.

I want to actually get the best possible outcome, not be the smuggest asshole in the death camp. Maybe you see value in that. I sure don't. Nor do I understand why you're having so much trouble understanding very simple arguments I've made. You started this whole thing by whining that Americans actually care about the election rather than just acting above it all like a South Park character, as you're doing. IntrepidSkeptic (talk) 03:31, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

"Once again, it's not an either/or." -except with what I am arguing it very much is because otherwise, you have to violate the Law of noncontradction. My position is the claim that the ethically correct stance is to have zero tolerance for racism, and you are arguing that is okay to have a non-zero tolerance for racism. One is the negation of the other. P and ~ P, they both can't be true. So you either tolerate Biden and/or Trump or you don't tolerate racism. You can't have both. There is no compatibility with my ethics or yours, you just tolerate a little more racism than I do. You can just bite the bullet on that and admit you think a little racism is okay.

"Trump is a threat to the democratic process entirely and if he's elected, we may never even have another election. Biden is not, but he's the only other candidate with a realistic chance of defeating Trump - there's the asymmetry." this proves you have no idea what the fuck I mean by asymmetry. I mean it in the sense of a two-place relational predicate like you'd find in First-Order Logic. How does this answer the question of why it is not the case that not voting for Trump is a vote for Biden? Also, how do you know the result is going to be Trump vs. Biden again? One or both of them can fall ill and be forced to drop out, one of them could get killed, one of them can fail to win the nomination, or maybe it turns out that the lawyers that have been arguing that Trump can't legally run for president anymore turn out to be correct, or many other countless things -- some of which being very probable consider both Trump and Biden's ages.

Half of this shit you are arguing about with "death camps" is straight speculative catastrophizing that is by no means currently warranted. You have zero fucking evidence that is something that is realistically going to happen. I made no mention of any "grand socialist revolutions", what makes you even think I currently identify as a socialist? Talking about not "holding delusion beliefs" but half this conversation is just been you forwarding claims based on nothing but assumptions without evidence. "Best possible outcome" honey, have a fucking political imagination. - Only Sort of Dumb (talk) 04:25, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

I just want to make one point. The 'death camp' imagery was rhetoric dating back to Katrina, which was a horrible Hurricane that caused a lot of flooding and people in the area 'looted' stores of food and supplies. A strange divestment/criticism came when Obama was in office and suddenly FEMA was not Failing to deal with a disaster, but 'designed' to wrangle people, after which would come The Disaster. still waiting on the FEMA camp The Disaster. The idea of a camp, of an indoctrination or concentration camp has been so real to Republicans for so long that I wouldn't cross it off reactionary Republicans goals. In their heads, Democrats tried to do it first. In their heads, democrats are doing it in public schools. You have to be prepared for the dreamworld republicans believe will work. Torrent (talk) 07:52, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

I think IS in this case is experiencing an understandable anxiety, though is misunderstanding what the genuine consequences would be as a non-binary person worried about anti-trans legislation happening if project 2025 takes hold. They are assuming that the reality will be them being sent into “death camps” which isn’t inference from genuine empirical evidence. The actual reality is if you wanted to get rid of trans and non-binary people from public places, you only have to reinstitute past policies of anti-“cross dressing” laws, removing rights to change your sex on your ID, banning gender affirming care from healthcare, etc. That would be genuinely awful, but you have to hinge this on Trump not only being legally able to run, but that he will be the republican candidate, that he will be facing Biden, that the MAGA crowd represents the majority of republican voters, and that something like project 2025 will be pulled off successfully, and the individuals involved are sufficiently competent enough. There is a lot of “if”’s there. There is no direct evidence that all those things are likely to happen, especially given laws of condtionalization from a strict Bayesian perspective. It’s doesn’t seem there is much credence to put a high degree of belief in all those things being likely, unless a significant amount of evidence comes about to require us to update our credences. It’s not epistemically responsible to currently see something like “death camps” for non-binary people as a significantly probable outcome. That flies in the face of the epistemic norms guiding scientific skepticism, a wise enbie always purports the strength of their beliefs to the strength of their evidence. There is no evidence that pushing those on the far-left or with more radical politics to “vote blue no matter who” will have any appreciable effect on the outcome. Especially considering that it’s a demographic that makes up less than 10% of the population, and liberals still overwhelmingly outnumber conservatives by population. - Only Sort of Dumb (talk) 19:48, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

How legitimate is the threat of Project 2025?

Just to know how prepared I should be or if it is overblown. As a gay man I moved out of Florida already and I want to know if this is gonna be some sure thing I'll have to plan for or if it's just an empty threat. I just never thought things would get this bad.47.5.66.54 (talk) 06:12, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

Get a passport and keep it updated. It is absolutely a threat and all of the anti-electoralist morons out there really aren't taking it seriously. Make sure you vote and get everyone you can to do the same. IntrepidSkeptic (talk) 06:18, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

You'll survive, but get ready for wonton deregulation. A Casey's chain gas station by my home now has 4 slots-like games. I haven't tried one yet. Apparently they are 'skill-based' and Nebraska wouldn't want to punch down on the little guy. https://nebraskaexaminer.com/2024/01/22/compromise-on-taxing-skill-games-gets-a-thumbs-down-from-small-operators/ I went to Vegas once, drove through Nevada a couple times, been to Keno bars. I've seen a guy win 800 bucks on Keno. One time. That was like 20 years ago.

Both parties are economists' dream jerk circles. If you behave exactly as the economists would, you will be fine. The republican economists would say your employer should spend a dime of every dollar they earn, and so you should too, because that's how capital accrues, and if you want an extra dime, go find an employer that can earn two dollars off you and will pay you two dimes. The Democrats say the economy has to be fluid, and if the employers can't pay out two dimes on the dollar, let's find that second dime somewhere, it's gotta be somewhere, let's all look because $7.25 as a minimum wage works for every state that doesn't want to change things on their own. If you want to be a politician in America, you have to start with at least 1 million dollars. How do you get 1 million dollars that you are willing to put on the line for a political bid? By being an asshole who thinks 1 million dollars sounds about right for a political bid. The next step? Ask for money, because if you make less than your opponent you are just gonna lose.

The world won't end, it didn't in 2016 and it won't in 2024, Project 2025 is a scary plan, but we will have to deal with it. Comes down to it I'll let you borrow my neutral colored clothes and hide you in my attic. If Lindsay Graham can pass, I have hope for anyone. Torrent (talk) 08:09, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

Definitely make sure you have a passport and that it is up to date. If you have in any way ever felt threatened by tRump or the Heritage Foundation (backers of Project 2025), it's a good idea to make backup plans ahead of time. Bongolian (talk) 08:15, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

To quote the pepper maxim; 'when The Event is top of the news bulletin, it is too late to prepare'. Start thinking now stuff like 'where could I go?', 'how will I get there?' and 'what are my Red Flags (sign it's time to run)?' Build alt plans, get you gear into shape (not just a passport, but some ready cash, documents etc). Treat it like hurricane prepping, but said hurricane is MAGA's Randoid's Tale. KarmaPolice (talk) 09:57, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

I'm concerned that I can't get my parents and siblings to take it seriously… they think my disdain for Republicans is "overblown extremism". We're in New England, so we'll probably be fine, but I can't help worrying about the rest of the country. Luigifan18 (talk) 18:54, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

Depending on who you are and what you look like, "being in New England" does not necessarily mean you're going to be fine. At some point tRump's minions would try to mobilize federal forces to begin extrajudicial mass deportations of suspected undocumented immigrants, this is would undoubtedly pick up and deport legal residents in the chaos. This already happened in tRump's previous reign.[3] As Maya Angelou said, "When people show you who they are, believe them." Bongolian (talk) 19:06, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

For many reasons, I personally am skeptical that Trump can fully implement Project 2025... let alone Trump's own "Agenda 47" (more likely to be the focus; this plan has less Christian nationalism elements from what I recall. Namely, a lot of the extreme sex puritanism obsession in Project 2025, e.g. outlaw pornography and abortion pills, is not in Agenda 47 from what I know). Nonetheless, I would be very concerned if you are transgender, a government employee, an educator, or an immigrant. It is clear that Trump will directly try to target these groups. (Although Trump tends to be less concerned with women's reproductive health, Republicans in general have not, so I'd also be wary of a Republican government if one is a woman or in the health care industry).

One of the reasons I'm skeptical about the plans' full success (some chaos and partial crap here and there, of course, is guaranteed) is because much of my impression that the "Westpoint crowd" really seems to detest Trump; my suspicion is that the top military brass would be wary to outright hostile of any blatantly un-Constitutional order from him. As long as this is the case, I suspect that the more liberal states would indeed be a suitable backup plan. A definite "red flag", of course, would be if this situation changes. BobJohnson (talk) 01:25, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

New England has a bit more protection because they're solid 'Blue' and even the Red bits are the normally the hated 'RINO' types example, they last went for a Republican president in 1984. This means a New Englander would normally get a bit more warning in any 'boiling frog' scenario (as compliance would more likely need to be forced upon them and well, that would take time). It is also much closer to the Canadian border, if needs be.

And I fully agree with BobJ; the 'BLM summer riots' and finally Jan 6th made it clear - that the American ruling class and much of the 'salariat' had no appetite for any unconstitutional 'interludes' at that point. Question is; can their minds be changed in the medium-term? KarmaPolice (talk) 01:59, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

I dunno man, like I said I'm gay and I already left Florida because of you know who. I just want to know so I can plan things out.47.5.66.54 (talk) 04:24, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

You can say who, it's either a failed descent, or Bungles Trump. Let's say we see project 2025 start. We will watch every member bungle their position under pressure. The only guys who held it together last regime were 'pay me to build the wall' grifter Steve Bannon and literal father of rat fucking plus tattoo of Richard Nixon on his back (must be a lost bet, let's be honest) Roger Stone. Both are respected conservative strategists. Let's consider that. Roger Stone and Steve Bannon are RESPECTED strategists. It's like forgetting that Ted Cruz went to Harvard. Torrent (talk) 08:25, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

However, 'possession of law degree' does not automatically mean 'is a political master strategist'. Perhaps the best transferrable skill there is 'good debating skills'. Anyway, part of prepping is looking at possible realistic scenarios. The most worrying 'realistic' issue is the desire/plan (in my opinion) to sack a lot of the Federal civil service and replace them with MAGA loyalists - which can help short-circuit the rule of law and administrative norms. The true 'red flag' here is if they manage to get control of the hiring process, which shall really help in 'remaking it in their image'. KarmaPolice (talk) 09:57, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

Remember, too, that the grass is not *always* greener on the other side of the fence. In Canada, dissatisfaction with Trudeau's Liberal party is *much* stronger than dissatisfaction with the Democrats are in the US. And while the Canadian Tories still have some more nuance compared to the GOP post Trump takeover (certainly I've heard less anti-democratic musings), the Alberta strain of Canadian Tories is very much as transphobic as the GOP is. So this complicates the "Canada option". (Although, as in the United States, there also is significant governing differences between provinces, so assuming democracy and federalism holds there -- and democracy has been stronger in Canada than the US of late -- most of the Canadian provinces would be similar to liberal US states. If gay, just avoid Alberta.)

If one is merely gay and not transsexual (the later will be unfortunately heavily attacked by a Trump administration), the big direct issues a Trump term would probably raise that I know of are: A) the "oh noes gays in school library books!" moral panic; and B) some rollback of discrimination protection in health care, employment, etc. Issue A in fact might be muted due to the spectacular hypocritical crash-and-burn of Moms for Liberty in recent months. The complete failure of Ron DeSantis's anti-"woke" presidential campaign helps here too, as DeSantis did directly attack non-transsexual LGBTQ+ much more extensively; such won him little votes, so this might discourage others from going too much further in this direction.

The bigger problem might be indirect, e.g. social climate. The first Trump term encouraged radical right-wing pond scum to crawl out of their basements and occasionally enact violence against Others. It's very possible that a second Trump term would be similar. Unfortunately, this issue exists everywhere for LGBTQ+ (and not just with the alt-right scum threat -- recall that one of the two big anti-LGBTQ+ mass shootings in US history was made by an Islamic nut). But from my perspective, liberal towns in liberal states would probably still be the best bet here (at least until further red flags pop up, that is). BobJohnson (talk) 17:34, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

Sorry, but the gays and trans gotta suffer because leftists want to elect Trump by proxy in hopes of their revolution which they'll totally win.-Ryan1257 (talk) 06:46, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

I see Ryan has yet again nothing to offer other than a dumbass strawman. There is nothing new under the sun. Carthage (talk) 11:34, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Ryan is completely right, though. Wokescold morons who bitch about people who actually try to change things rather than just whine on Twitter are never going to accomplish anything. Anyone who advocates anti-electoralism at this point is either a complete idiot or incredibly bad faith. There's no other way to be that ignorant about the threat Trump, the Republicans and Project 2025 poses. IntrepidSkeptic (talk) 04:21, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

Online socialists are the type of people who say, "Fuck voting! My method, fire-bombing a Wal-Mart, is superior!", then don't even go out and do that. They won't even campaign for their supposed third-party pick since they already know they won't win, they just want to brag on the internet about how much morally superior they are.-Ryan1257 (talk) 17:34, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

I know it's fun to strawman and all, but care to elaborate how criticism of Biden equates to support for Trump? Carthage (talk) 17:58, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

Criticism is one thing, but pretending not voting for Biden won't lead to a Trump presidency and an overall worse situation for everyone is not just delusional, it's self-sabotaging. And I don't care whether you think it's a strawman or not, I know what I've seen from self-proclaimed socialists and leftists online.-Ryan1257 (talk) 18:17, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

It's not unfounded, I don't think the Dems really want to protect women, as in a comfortable Roe v Wade overturn, and that cynicism can be reasonably extrapolated. It's not pointless to point out that taking a comfortable loss isn't the same as losing and does warrant a 'what the fuck?' on behalf of those losing. I wonder where your straw man comes from. Torrent (talk) 13:03, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

I personally believe/suspect that if the Congress had a Dem majority, they would at least put in 'in cases of rape/incest/unviability/threat to life' abortion legalisation at a Federal level [if I remember right, they did try this after the original SCOTUS overturning]. More would be nice, yes; but not only do I think they wouldn't be able to find a majority within the Democrats to carry it but they are also desiring to not overly inflame the Dominionist's anger [and if it's not going to carry, the anger-creation wouldn't even achieve anything]. But back to the original point.

I personally rate 'social climate' as the current biggest credible threat - and I will push it further than BobJ by painting a situation where legal protections etc still technically exist, but no longer do so in actuality due to complete lack of enforcement by regulators, police or law courts. For example, completely defunding regulators/inspectors for possible breaches of the discrimination legislation, anal-literal readings of legislation which means 'discimination' is almost impossible to prove and a stacking of judge benches with MAGA-hats who invaribly bend their judgements to fit their own views ['LGBT parade disturbing the peace, banned' and then 'transphobic angry protests is frweeedom of speech, allowed' etc]. And I mainly cited Canada because like with draft-dodgers in the 1960s, it perhaps the easiest country to get to from the USA. KarmaPolice (talk) 14:06, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Injustice towards goats on TV Tropes

So, I linked to the Cruel Elephant and Brutal Bird of Prey TV Tropes pages for Crimsolusion's section of my Progress & Regress Pokémon page, since those are the tropes for villainous elephants and eagles. I wanted to link to the tropes about heroic goats and donkeys in Azureality's section, but when I asked about a heroic goat trope on the Trope Finder… apparently there isn't one?!? WTF?!? They have a trope for villainous goats (Gruesome Goat), but they don't have the opposite of that?!? We at RationalWiki can't let that stand!! Obviously, I need to launch some sort of heroic goat trope, but I'm not sure what to call it or the particulars of how to define it (except for "the opposite of Gruesome Goat"), and I can't think of any good examples except for the Dreemurrs from Undertale and Deltarune and the protagonists of that Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf show from China. Could I get a helping hand, please? Luigifan18 (talk) 00:53, 11 March 2024 (UTC)

You may be at a disadvantage here. Sadly, in most fiction and legend, as well as myth and song, goats tend to consist of three roles--

Ornery old animals that are ornery,

Background scenery, and

Food. (Hi, Thor!)

The simple reason why there are no heroic goat tropes is that there are almost no heroic goats in the applicable fictive world, and therefore not enough examples of the non-existent heroic goats to establish a trope.

Clearly, the rational and logical solution is to pour vast amounts of the money we collectively make as shills into researching time travel so we can go back to, say, Classical Greece and insert a crapload of pro-goat tales and myths, including if at all possible a few goat-positive Deific Avatars (Zeus, for example would certainly make an excellent goat), and repeat across all of the Ancient World. This will establish goats in a more positive literary light beyond being lunch or gruff.

Or maybe something else, but that's all I can think of at the moment. Kencolt (talk) 02:00, 11 March 2024 (UTC)

I think you are being a bit dismissive of Thor's goats. They were present in the original Thor the God series so loved by the ancient Vikings and later turned up in the revamped Marvel version. What's not to like about Tanngrisnir and Tanngnjóstr?Bob^{"Life is short and (insert adjective)"} 14:05, 11 March 2024 (UTC)

Well,they tend to be a bit fatty and tough. Also a touch gamy, although some like that. Kencolt (talk) 17:01, 11 March 2024 (UTC)

That very much depends. I've eaten some fantastic goat stew - now I think about it, roasted too.Bob^{"Life is short and (insert adjective)"} 20:16, 11 March 2024 (UTC)

I remember hearing somewhere that tragedy in ancient Greek meant "Goat-song" for unknown reasons Ioe bidome (talk) 22:04, 11 March 2024 (UTC)

I recently heard about a game called Pseudoregalia through FeliciaFan on YouTube… I guess that's one more for the list. Luigifan18 (talk) 15:58, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

Beware

Today, even if it has not yet come for the US. Anna Livia (talk) 00:42, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

Well, that's vague and ominous. Surely a good omen. Chillpilled (talk) 00:56, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

The Ides of March. Anna Livia (talk) 01:04, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

Oh, now I can breathe again. Chillpilled (talk) 01:09, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

Well, I no Caesar. In fact, I no hear 'er either, or smell 'er, or anything to do with 'er. Kencolt (talk) 05:44, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

ABIACABAB (All Believers In "All Cops Are Bastards" Are Bastards)?

I recently saw an r/ACAB post in my Reddit feed in which the community is essentially ragging on someone for making a very good point about not hating a whole group because of a few jerkwads, just because that very good point is in blatant defiance of their rabid cop hatred. Thoughts on this? Luigifan18 (talk) 18:46, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

I think “hating a whole group because of a few jerkwads” misunderstand the social metaphysics of it all to be fair. Social groups that are of a matter of relevance in understanding oppression for example typically describes the sort of community one just happens to find themselves in not by choice. When evaluating the ethics of a particular social group one has to look at the social processes that maintain it. You have to consider factors which are in some way “immutable” (i.e. no one can change their genetic ancestry, the sex organs they born with, the natural eye colour, whether or not they experience same sex attraction, if their deaf, experience gender dysphoria, etc). The way in which certain social categories are historically and culturally contingent, and what events or activities brought them about. Very importantly, what the group exists for. I am much more comfortable with a notion of “abolishing whiteness” then I am “abolishing blackness”, even though both are categories that resulted from a rationalization of colonial conquest, or at the very least descendent from it. The former is based upon a notion of being a superior or “default” in-group, the other far less so, more so built in a cultural identity based in resistance if anything. When we talk of ACAB the idea being cops are bad qua cops, not that cops are bad because a significant of bad people are cops. It is almost not even about the personal characteristics of individual cops, but rather that entire instintuition of policing itself is that where the function is oppression. Translating to Iris Young’s “Five Faces” at the very least the function of policing is for the purpose of violence. - Only Sort of Dumb (talk) 19:35, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

I'm not to big on sweeping generations myself either. There are good cops out there, but with everything we've seen in the past several years, anyone saying that there aren't major problems with modern American police has to be willfully ignorant. I'm the kind of person that feels that law enforcement is necessary for a functioning society. Crime is going to happen, be it born our of desperation, derangement or arrogance. But that means I want people who are given such authority to be held to high standards of competence and behavior. Anyway, I do agree that there are ACAB people who take it too far and do get blinded by ideologic zeal. If anything, this shows the importance of nuance. Paul S (talk) 20:18, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

I would argue that a lot of the nuance gets lost when you make certain philosophical commitments that are taken for granted. Like talking about “good cops” and “bad cops” takes it that the relevant analysis is in terms of judging the properties of individuals — which may not actually be what the object of critique here. Assuming that the folks who shout “ACAB” are necessarily working from that atomized framework runs the risk of making certain unwarranted generalizations yourself about them. The object of critique may be more towards the institution as a whole, and talking about it being a social necessity depends pretty heavily on what our ideas about “law” entails, and what is the metaphysics of “crime”. Is all crime necessarily bad? It stopping violent behaviour on par with, more important, or less important than stopping unlawful behaviour? Being that it’s called law enforcement, the intention is that obedience to law requires a threat of force. Is that strictly speaking true? How broad are we thinking of law enforcement here? Would violence mediators, social workers, and mental health support workers constitute law enforcement? What about civilian militias? Are any of these options morally preferable? Or are they less preferable? Is justice fundamentally about retribution? Or is it about fairness, quarantining threats to human well being, or repairing human relationships? I think broad dismissals and tendencies towards easy answers kind of deflects any requirement for reflection or critical thinking about the necessity of policing. I don’t think it would harmful to ask oneself is “policing” as we understand it in the North American context truly ethical? I am sympathetic to saying it isn’t, but given the real antisocial threats to people’s lives and property, the question then becomes what are the alternatives? There are scholars who work in areas to address that exact question. - Only Sort of Dumb (talk) 21:07, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

This misses the point: ACAB is a systemic critique. Not an individual one. I suppose it's easier to strawman than to accurately address, though. Carthage (talk) 03:31, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

Accurately address it, then. I have my own thoughts (which for reference are pretty far from Law and Order^TM), and I'm epistemically humble enough to know I don't have the definitive answer. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 07:14, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

It's pretty self-explanatory, no? The institution of police serve to uphold a fundamentally unjust system, so therefore cops take responsibility for that unjust system. Whether or not you would consider the system to be "unjust" would depend on your ethical priors, obviously, but to pretend that this argument holds no weight just because it differs from your ethical priors is not a relevant critique. Carthage (talk) 07:16, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

It's how you deploy the cops and the law. I do agree, A person who takes on the role of a police officer does have the responsibility to stand between a criminal with illicit power, be it a gun, drugs, general loitering, any traffic or vehicle violation, theft of any level, assaults (domestic, consenting, any level) it has to be understood it sucks to be a cop. But that has to be as understood as being a nurse. A nurse might have to dodge a punch and wipe an ass. Nursing homes where nurses have to do everything are also hotbeds of violence. 'Defund the police' is silly, but 'reorganize police funding' sounds kinda complicated. I bet most anybody hearing 'reorganize police funding' in America would understand the rally. Torrent (talk) 09:05, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

@Torrent Please do not bold your entire post. If you didn't mean to add the semi-colon to the beginning of your post, it is an easy mistake to make. MirrorIrorriM (talk) 13:10, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

whoops Torrent (talk) 08:36, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

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Well one shouldn't condemn an entire group of course. It is an obvious cognitive error unless the group is by definition bad; e.g., rapists, drug dealers, jay-walkers, etc. But many people feel that way. Let them have their say. A majority of Black Americans (55%) want police presence in their community to remain the same or increase. That leaves 45% who are unhappy about the current policing situation in their neighborhoods. They have to vent about it. In addition, one might consider the motive involved in calling a policeman a "bastard." 90% of the population might think of police as a bunch of rude fellows, incapable of civil relations with the general public. Policemen might be regarded as bastards for the same reason your neighbor is a bastard: he doesn't give a damn about you either. The difference is, the police are paid to serve the public. Although the low character of the general public might explain the occasional police indifference to public sentiments, they still ought to be grateful enough to at least try to be polite to our non-criminal citizenry.UncleKrampus (talk) 15:03, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

There is a point to be made that the police are not the equivalent to any other occupation, but are in actuality the enforcement arm of the state. To those critical of the system, criticism of the police goes hand in hand with that. Also, how do we define what "bad" actually means in this context? What ethical priors are we using, and can they be subjected to critique? Are we conflating legality with ethicality? How are drug dealers any different from the merchant at the liquor store? They're both selling intoxicants, one just happens to receive state sanctioning. Carthage (talk) 15:17, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

I don't see the point in questioning whether police are the enforcement arm of the state. What else would they officially be doing? I concede that they are always acting in that capacity. If they are limiting themselves to enforcing necessary laws, good for them. "Drug dealer" traditionally denotes a kind of criminal and still does really. I am not defining "bad," I am using normative language. One could argue for incoherent social standards. Muslim men could have more than one wife, poor people might be expected to deal drugs to escape poverty, etc. Not my business really. I don't think the public buys that sort of argument. UncleKrampus (talk) 15:51, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

Bruh said one shouldn’t condemn an entire group, when I just presented an argument that it depends on the nature of that group. Obviously there is a morally relevant distinction between condemning all asian people, and condemning say, pedophiles. Sometimes yes, you can and should condemn entire groups. Other times it would be inappropriate. This is why anti-discrimination laws make distinctions of about groups being immutable. Being a conservative, for example, is a choice; being black, is not. - Only Sort of Dumb (talk) 22:01, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

Krampus, your numbers are WAY off. It's actually 82% of Black Americans who want the same or more police presence. The ACAB crowd has ironically done the job of White Supremacists in terms of 1) making Black communities less safe, and 2) making the general public less sympathetic to the plight of the Black community. CorruptUser 18:04, 11 March 2024 (UTC)

The numbers are not provided with any additional context, and the survey only addressed whether or not respondents felt they needed more or less police presence in their community, without assessing if they were any alternatives they were aware of, or if they’d prefer them if it was shown to be more effective for public safety. There also still about 1/5th of black respondents who didn’t answer so favourably, and I don’t know why it is just assume that the opinion of nearly a quarter of black people do not matter. Black and hispanic Americans have a poverty rate about 18-21%, roughly double that of whites, but ~80% of black and hispanic people are still classified as being above “low income”. You assume that the percentages reflect the attitudes of Black Americans in low income, or high crime areas but the majority of respondents if randomly sampled wouldn’t reflect that. The data isn’t necessarily going to reflect the attitudes of black or hispanic peoples in low income and heavily policed communities. White people often rank police very highly as well, but the majority of them are also the sort of folks who don’t have to worry about the police in the same way. The privilege does not exist solely on racial lines, but class lines as well, though there is clear evidence of white privilege regardless in the fact that black people still disproportionately expect interactions with the police to go negatively. - Only Sort of Dumb (talk) 22:59, 11 March 2024 (UTC)

You should also think more critically about this data, and embed it into it’s proper historical context. What do you mean doing the job of white supremacy? Who exactly is making black people “less safe”? (I don’t think you are imaging gangs of white people patrolling black neighbourhoods to commit crime when making that suggestion). What are the implications about black people you are making here? And why do you assume that the respondents are willing to request more presence without any sense of conflict, nuance, or reluctance? Most people I don’t think can imagine a world without police. If they are the only institution that you know of that enforce public safety, then what else do you advocate for if safety is what you desire? You are going to get inherently biased results with any such data, when the only theorists that talk of alternatives to policing are fringe academics. You are never going to get a majority opinion in favour of something people can’t even conceptualize as being possible, or never seriously engaged with that area of thought. Regardless, it is an appeal to popularity fallacy to think any such polling data can determine whether or not an institution is ethical to exist. - Only Sort of Dumb (talk) 23:11, 11 March 2024 (UTC)

I think you are looking past the point here fellow. That is, a very large majority probably recognize that society can not work without enforcement mechanisms, and policing is the only real solution that they know. I admit there may be some variety of policing that would be an improvement. If you think people could be trusted to operate decently under the rule of some kind of honor system and without the hard persuasion to enforce the social contract afforded by the presence of armed militias, then the discussion can go no further.UncleKrampus (talk) 23:39, 11 March 2024 (UTC)

OSOD looks past the point constantly, and apparently has no understanding of metaphor or allegory. Instead, they constantly nitpick rather than address the point being made. It's to the point where either the "sort of" part of their name is totally off base or they're just incredibly bad faith. Either way, don't expect to ever get anywhere. IntrepidSkeptic (talk) 06:36, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

But none of that determines whether or not cops are “good”, so it is not even a relevant criticism to “ACAB people”. The object of criticism is not to whether or not the majority of people agree with them, even when talking of disadvantaged people. That’s not ethically relevant. What is relevant is if they are “correct”. We can imagine a society where “x” despite being morally wrong, was something that was both thought of as popular and necessary, to which the majority thought it was a morally necessary. It is not a logical contradiction to imagine that they are simply mistaken, and their moral judgements are in error. - Only Sort of Dumb (talk) 00:33, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

It may be irrelevant to say police are good or not good if the conclusion does not motivate a solution. The object of criticism is not predetermined by so-called ethical considerations where there is no definite ethical system in play at the outset. It may be there is no solution that is ethical with respect to the given framework. An academic solution is also irrelevant if it is not generally accepted by popular consent.UncleKrampus (talk) 00:49, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

So you’re a moral relativist then? Or an error theorist? So, for the very few hunter-gatherer tribes that practice ritualistic sexual abuse on children, or the historical institutions of slavery, the degree to which we can in any meaningful way say to which those things are “bad” depends on popular consent? Or is it simply that there is no actually existing ethical framework to say such things are “bad” to begin with? - Only Sort of Dumb (talk) 02:21, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

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I've never met anyone who unironically uses ACAB that I thought were particularly bright or grown-up.-Ryan1257 (talk) 06:36, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

And I never met anyone (myself included) who edited on Ratwiki who wasn't psued. It's really unfortunate it is. - Only Sort of Dumb (talk) 08:43, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

I actually [sorta] agree with Dumb on this one; that in short the more 'privilege' you enjoy in society, the more positive your 'baseline experience' with Authority is [not just cops]. Therefore, there is groups in society who will have poor baselines; a land where your 'rights' are either theoretical or 'up for debate'.

I do have some sympathy with the 'ACABs' when I consider the possible situation where decades of building an aggressive, authoritarian and militarised police with 'wrong' priorities may have led to their recuitment/retention pool to be hugely dominated by people who like things like that [or at least are indifferent to such things]. After all, every one of us has lists of 'jobs we would never do' on moral/ethical grounds; I for example wouldn't ever do debt recovery because I would be sickened by the idea of stealing folks' meagre possessions to fatten some big bank. On a related issue, being a cop is a job; bad companies end up filled with 'the unsuitables' because all the decent folks have ended up getting jobs elsewhere, so this can happen to PDs or even individual station-houses.

I also agree, that some folks [esp Americans] have so little outside knowledge about 'other ways of policing' that they often end up in the rabbit-hole in hating the concept of 'policing' because they don't think a fair, competent police force with better priorities can even exist. And as Krampus points out, if you have a society which has laws there then has to be some form of enforcement for those who don't want to follow them [and then followed by there needing to be some form of 'judging' and then 'punishing' afterwards] and generally speaking, that's better-done by a dispassionate professional than a bunch of biased randos with big sticks. I know of the polling Dumb is citing above; it tells us that even the vast majority of the 'dis-privileged' groups in American society get this. KarmaPolice (talk) 12:58, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

There are actually countries with far worse police forces than the United States (whether they are underfunded / nonexistent, under-trained, corrupt as hell, or all of the above). This is not a positive thing.

Nonetheless, from my perspective, American police stand out within developed nations for being overly-aggressive and trigger happy (almost darkly comically so in many cases -- what other developed nation would feature a police officer unloading their gun multiple times due to hearing an acorn hit his car?) and overly militarized, with rhetoric from some parts making police work seem like combat in a war zone instead of "to protect and serve". Compared to other developed nations, American police are way under-trained, and there's elements of masochism, racism, and corruption that shouldn't be there. Granted, thanks to a variety of factors (but Second Amendment identity culture is a big one), American society is more violent than most developed nations. Still, it could be better. Most developed nations IMHO are.

The problem with "all cops are bad" here is that the above issues are solvable, without denigrating an entire profession. It's pretty easy to envision what a society with cops would look like (look at the largely unregulated cryptocurrency scamfest for a taste of that), so I don't buy the "all cops" argument when it's really the American system that is rotten. I often personally find libertarians silly, but on American police excess, I feel that libertarians like Radley Balko have made better arguments. (Of course, mostly for naught, as the "rotten system" is sadly supported by "the paranoid middle America" type that watches the largely right-wing propaganda shit like Fox News that keeps telling them that crime is way up over the decades. Even though it is way down.) BobJohnson (talk) 13:50, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Proper training, howsoever one might define it, is evidently the most obvious solution to police violence. It won't make people like police a lot more than is natural because people don't like being watched and told what to do. The wider problem is certainly the prevalence of general criminality. Nothing jacks up police anxiety like dangerous people. Looking at the far right, they seem determined to present as aggressive and intractable. We think of police abusing minorities, which does happen. We don't want them empowering majority extremists. There are no instant solutions. UncleKrampus (talk) 19:16, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

I don’t know if it as an obvious solution per se, because some of the injustices are the result of decisions on the macro-policy level, and not so much on individual behaviour. Like I am not so sure that the issue of the “school-to-prison” pipeline as it relates to police presence on school grounds really ultimately boils down “unskilled” or “inappropriate” behaviour at the hands of individual cops. The discrepancies found on racial grounds often comes from the disproportionate amount of police in lower income neighbourhoods with more non-white demographics, compared to wealthier areas with higher white demographics. The nature of the crimes, past arrest data, whether the crimes are happening out in the open, or behind close doors, etc. All influence arrest data for a given geography, which in turn is used to inform decisions on the higher level to where police are the more likely find crime. This leads criminals in wealthier neighbourhoods doing their crimes privately behind close doors far less likely to be represented in such data, and this perpetuates certain biases further. It almost doesn’t matter how “good” or “bad” a given cop is on wider systematic issues at play. - Only Sort of Dumb (talk) 19:37, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Most obvious in the sense of general opinion of what needs to be done. I imagine some sociologists will have a comprehensive system designed for the purpose. Some philosophers will make generic declarations about power systems. But the general public, I believe, will tend to think in terms of additional training for police. I have no idea if it would work, but I don't think it would hurt. I don't see the point in questioning disproportionate police assignments, when these are ostensibly calculated based upon the rate of street crime, disproportionally worse in poorer neighborhoods. Patrolmen do not, as a rule, investigate white collar crime. If we want more investigation for tax evasion, for example, the IRS is hiring 30,000 employees in the next few years. I agree it doesn't matter how good or bad a cop may be. The law of averages should make cops reflect the population at large.

Antisocial personality disorder affects approximately 7.4 million Americans, or 3.5% of the population. NYPD has about 36,000 officers. At the rate of 3.5% that would be, on average, more than 1,200 bad cops in New York City. Can they be screened out? Maybe. But 1,200 bad cops in one city can make a lot of bad news. UncleKrampus (talk) 21:15, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Drug use, and drug dealing is happening in wealthy suburban neighbourhoods. I know this having grown up in one. It’s how we white teens get our drugs. There was a grow up on our street, but I hardly ever interacted with police in my life. So I don’t think it is simply that the wealthier neighbourhoods are dealing with particularly white collar crime, or that white people are engaging with the non-white collar crimes less. If the data is anything to go by for drug related offences, that is decidedly not the case. - Only Sort of Dumb (talk) 01:03, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

I also think framing the issue as a “few bad apples” trackable by ASPD diagnoses has deeply problematic associations that fuel mental health stigmatization, and isn’t a particularly well-formed empirical analysis of the problem. Systematic issues aren’t created by the bad behaviour of individual actors. There is often an entire history of enacted policies, laws, and social systems set up that results in racially biased outcomes. Undoing that requires some kind of social restructuring. Abolition talk is I think particularly limited when there is no positive plan to restructure. - Only Sort of Dumb (talk) 01:25, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

If you're a CT resident who wants find out how lack of policing intersects with mental illness, it takes about 10 minutes on the main drag in north Middletown after dark. And of course there was this lunacy. Rethinking policing is great, the problem I see is that a lot of people would suggest sending in a "mental health professional" to deal with someone who (in this example) has attacked multiple people with a staff, thrown urine at passers by, and killed someone's dog; that's not a remotely workable solution. If they tried that in north Middletown, within hours or days one of these "mental health professionals" would turn up hospitalized or dead. The same people who want to reform policing (you have not said this, so I'm not accusing you) also have a way of opposing involuntary commitment. If you need further proof that involuntary commitment is absolutely essential to police reform, look up the name Larry Hogue; absent a prison sentence that was the only way to resolve the situation, thankfully it somehow happened without anyone being killed. It's obviously not the only part of the solution, but it's the one I'm most familiar with and therefore the part I'll put forward. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 04:11, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

You can be discounted on the simple basis that this entire response illustrates very strongly you have no idea what sort of things happen in a psychiatric ward because if you did you would absolutely not claim that mental health professionals in these types of situations are not remotely workable. Do you know how often patients need to be restrained? Do you know how often nurses in all areas of healthcare are subject to threats of violence from patients who can overpower them? Mental health pros are also not the only suggestion for an alternative policy. Violence mediation is also suggested and practiced in certain municipalities with an appreciable degree of success. This isn't even getting to the policies of reducing crime via measures like reducing poverty, providing CBT to restructure the identities of past offenders, the legalization of gangs, etc. Things that have all been tried, with some degree of evidence for success, see [4], and [5] for reference. - Only Sort of Dumb (talk) 05:38, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

Conflict avoidance/resolution training would be a godsend if we included it as part of public school education, and would go a long way to reducing a lot of the problems we have with the police without ever having to touch the police themselves. CorruptUser 10:06, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

You clearly have no idea what I know, and you're leaving out a few things. How many people in psych units are waving around guns, carrying butcher knives, or are interacting with children? I think we're actually fairly close to each other for policies dealing with it, but it can't be just "mental health professionals" dealing with this. And agree that conflict avoidance would go a long way too. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 14:16, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ I think the main issue with the 'mental health emergency teams' is that they do need police backup. Yes, the you might be able to resolve incidents by 'talking them down' but there is times that it won't work. So mixed medical/cop teams would be the best of both. Having cops better trained so they have non-gun 'dispute resolution tools' (tasers, spray or the humble baton) at hand will also reduce the numbers of fatal 'interactions' too. KarmaPolice (talk) 11:15, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

There is also something worth acknowledging in that the extreme threat of guns is something specific to the US context. With an oversupply of gun production you get much higher levels of guns accessibility. Which is also fuelled in part via the increasing militarization of police adding to the supply of fire arms. Americans are flabbergasted to learn that police in some European countries are often not armed, and though it seems an obvious suggestion to some, the United States context make such policies far less tenable from the outset. When we talk about the police too there is an issue to how wide we wish to define such an institution. Even some of the most vocal police abolitionists still suggest something of the form of “publicly elected public safety workers” or “voluntary militias to respond to violent anti-social behaviour”, and the follow up question ends up being “isn’t that just cops by a different name?”. I think even the “ACAB people” recognize the need to have social corporations that duty is to use violence to prevent further violence. The question then becomes, what is the most ideal way of doing that? There may not be a universal answer to that which works for every political context. - Only Sort of Dumb (talk) 17:59, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

I think ACAB types and even reformers can also be their own worse enemy when it comes to how they handle the victims of crime[6] [7]. Criminal advocacy by morons turns into, "the criminal is the true victim here!", style rhetoric like what is seen in the second story, or a lack of care towards crime victims in the first. Maybe that man had a tragic history, but what comfort is that towards the woman whose dog he killed. And what good did these ACAB activists do disrupting the formation of a neighborhood watch, a community-based policing system, just to boost their egos and dismiss someone's dog being killed as just a minor thing like you yelled at somebody when you shouldn't have[8]?-Ryan1257 (talk) 19:52, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

There is a deep irony in making this sort of argument, when there is a known problem of cops needlessly killing pet dogs (estimated at around 10’000 every year) [9]. A “criminal” kills a pet dog, as an anecdote, it’s moral travesty. Cops needlessly kill thousands of dogs every year, it’s simply part of job. - Only Sort of Dumb (talk) 21:17, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

So you ignore my point about activists ignoring or downplaying victims of crime to make a simple, "gotcha" on the dog killing part of the story so you can safely discount everything I said. I thought you were better than this.-Ryan1257 (talk) 21:45, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

ACAB at its best is, as others have pointed out, a systemic critique. Policing is pretty violent and dated way of dealing with a lot of society's problems and its an institution that arguably turns its own members into monsters. Rationalwikians should be familair enough with the psychology of authoritarianism to understand that giving people special rights, the ability to dish out violence (and special protections if accused of wrong-doing)

It is a recipe for narcissism, cruelty and utter indifference. It probably doesn't help that cops also spend a lot of time in antagonistic situations with the most difficult and upsetting members of the public and so will have mental health problems of their own and likely a very jaded attitude of the people they police, to compliment their sense of moral and social superiority (see various metaphors about wolves, sheepdogs and sheep). That and if you do have fascist tendencies (an obsession with order and a belief that societies problems can be best dealt with via gun, handcuffs and truncheon) then policing is probably a career that appeals to you - I mean when was the last time you heard of a U.S. department being infiltrated by Maoists and Anarchists? Where as the presence of white supremacist and far-right militia types is widely documented in police forces. And this problem is not limited to the U.S.

There is also often the sheer scale of corruption to consider. Just as a small example from my daily life, there is a "Public Order Officer" (riot cop) who trains at an MMA gym not far from me. He would regularly brag about roughing up people as he dragged them to cells or as he arrested them (kneeling on their neck, "accidentally dropping" his knee onto their face as he "secured them" etc). He openly explained to me how he enjoyed dawn-raids and catching/handcuffing people in their underwear so that when they were marched to the van it was extra humiliating. The last straw for me was when he bragged about tripping a hand-cuffed man to make him bash his head against the sink in a jail cell and wrote up in his report that that man had attacked him (the camera conveniently didn't work in that cell - and if it did I doubt it would have been hard to get rid of the tape). Now we can talk about that being "one bad cop", but it begs the question... if this was what he was willing to admit to random civilians at a sports club, what does his banter look like in the back of the van with his buddies on the way to a protest? I struggle to imagine that they are all discussing the importance of civil disobedience to a healthy democracy...

Indeed that kind of behaviour does not come about and is not displayed quite so "courageously" if it doesn't have an environment in which it is celebrated or at least tolerated. Someone like this, can only think that posting a rant where you openly admit to inventing charges to fuck with people who have annoyed you is a good idea if they are already in an environment where that behaviour is considered normal.

The problem with "cops just need more training" is that while that is technically true, it really shouldn't be cops that are in charge of deciding what that training looks like. Because when they do have money in the budget for extras they rarely spend it on anything sensible and instead blow it on grenade-launchers, Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected trucks and hiring psychotic ex-navy seals to give them a pep talk about how they're all warriors who must be ready to kill at a moments notice. Part of the issue here, especially in America, is that the culture within the police force and the kinds of people who sign up to be cops are largely morally inadequate. Any serious "liberal" style reform of policing, as oppossed to a more radical abolishment and restructuring, is going to have to get rid of so many individuals, shit practices and policies that you may as well just call it abolishment.

However there are plenty of ACAB people who are not particularly eloquent, informed or even pragmatic in their outlook. I can't imagine your average demonstrator being able to put together a particularly convincing anti-cop argument that would convince the other side. Focusing on them however strikes me as nut-picking as the majority of cop apologists also have understandings of the topic that are just as detatched from reality and who similarly would struggle to argue their position convincingly beyond appeals to the status quo. Tikitime2 (talk) 23:49, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

I think one thing that's been misconstrued is that I'm supportive of current police methods and that I'm not myself critical of all officers until proven otherwise. That said, people aren't going to change their opinion about policing if they feel change must come at the cost of their own safety. Until anti-law enforcement types give an option that makes people not just safe from cops, but safe from criminals as well, then a majority of people are not going to choose to abolish the police, and if they did, they'd create an identical organization.-Ryan1257 (talk) 04:10, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

Again, that is not entirely relevant to the ethics of the institution. Whether it is good or bad does not depend on popular opinion. There is also an assumption that public safety is the function of the police, which legally speaking may not be entirely accurate, see [10]. "Crime" is socially constructed, and most of the crimes that police deal with any given year are mild misdemeanours. Serious felonies only make for about 2% of what police deal with in a given year if sociologist Alex Vitale is to be believed. Hell, the show The First 48 was inspired by a real policy that some counties have where if a suspect is not found the first 48 hours after the start of a homicide investigation the case would be "closed". Current clearance rates suggest that if you murder someone there is a good chance (a coin toss really) you'll get away with it. [11][12] - Only Sort of Dumb (talk) 05:20, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

I think it is worth emphasizing, how much are we basing our views about police on unchecked assumptions? What is essentially, faith? Is that really reflective of us being skeptics here? There is no shame in having absolutely no commitment to whether police abolition is something that should be done or not, on the basis that there isn't any clear evidence if it will "work" or not.

I know it is a bit cliche. But if the vast majority of people thought slavery was a necessary institution for a running economy we wouldn't therefore make the argument that slavery was just, right? - Only Sort of Dumb (talk) 05:24, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

The nature of formal debate requires one to either propose or oppose. There is also the judicial position, wherein one should approach a debate with an initial impartiality, which would not usually be maintained indefinitely. There is indeed no shame in having no opinion concerning the abstract proposal. After all, one cannot be expert in everything and one would be wise to not advocate for positions one cannot well support. I imagine that the reorganization of any policing strategy would be initiated by public demand, and not by speculative ruminations of elected officials. UncleKrampus (talk) 14:57, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

But there is also no obligation to participate, or frame things as a formal debate. I think too public demand has limitations. 1) The public can demand unethical things (i.e. the seizing of Jewish owned property); 2) Public demand if it interpreted by majority support and not general will necessitates the discounting of minorities inherently - tyranny of the majority and all that. Ultimately I agree with Rousseau’s natural maxim, individuals need to be free to pursue their own interests with as little harm to others as possible. It is nor clear if policing as it currently exists is compatible with that. These ultimately grounds the moral obligations of a republic ala legitimate social contract. - Only Sort of Dumb (talk) 19:41, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

And the best video game adaption of 2024 is...

Dune II!

Wait.

Alright, time for me to 'sperg out a bit.

The Dune series by Frank Herbert is "holy" among nerds. This is the series that made environmentalism mainstream. This is the series whose fans invented entire genres of video games. Star Wars AND WH40K owe much of their lore to this series. So even if you haven't read the books, you've been impacted in some way by the Dune series.

Dune is sacred, in some sense, is what I'm saying. The bar is so high that Dune parts 1 & 2 had the problem that the Star Wars prequels had; if they were anything less than spectacular, they'd be Heresy.

Dune 1 met my standard. Dune 2 exceeded it.

First off, the Shai-Hulud. This overlaps with part 1, but long story short, the Sandworms are described as having 3 segments for their mouths. The filmmakers decided to change that, which should've been grounds for putting the director into a deathstill. However, seeing the mouth of the worm, to see that its mouth resembled a giant eye of an angry god, the maw of a beast that forever hungered, and the entrance to the underworld? If Frank Herbert would be upset, it's because he was outdone. Sort of like the author of Jaws being livid he didn't come up with "we're going to need a bigger boat" first. Good job on the worms is what I'm saying.

Next, the desert. I might be old and crotchety by your standards, but I was not around for Lawrence of Arabia. But the feeling I got while watching the landscapes of Arrakis must have been just like watching Lawrence of Arabia when it came out. So, good job on the deserts.

Ok, finally we get to the story, which I will gloss over, because spoilers for y'all. There were changes from the source material, but in some ways they were better. I liked that the Emperor's daughter was an actual character with agency. They made Feyd an honorable warrior, which was actually a massive thing considering it actually adds yet another theme to the series; of what value is "honor" as a virtue when you only do so for sadistic reasons?

And now for my gripes. There aren't many, but they should be mentioned. 1) There's no Sandtrout. They play a more important role later in the series, and the movie is already long, but they should've at least had a cameo. 2) There's a few action scenes where if the plot armor wasn't so thick, Paul would've died. But movie has to movie.

Not-gripe but should be addressed. There were people online hating Zendaya for portraying Chani, when the old movie had Sean Young in that role. This is foolish for a simple reason; Arrakis is one of the most brutal planets in existence, in a series where the author actually asks us to question how environments shape people and religions. You are NOT going to find a delicate beauty queen running around the deserts of Arrakis. Zendaya is fine for the role.

So yeah, go see that movie.CorruptUser 10:57, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

I wonder if Petroglyph will be asked to help contribute to another remaster as a result of the new popularity of the Dune universe. IntrepidSkeptic (talk) 12:08, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

Forgot to mention.

Dune is not exactly sci-fi, at least not at first. The technology is deliberately held back, because the focus of the story is on society. There are many themes, but the biggest one is a deconstruction of the "chosen one" messianic archetype. That badass guy riding the big worm? He's not an actual messiah, he's more of an antichrist that got lucky and your prophecy is actually the work of control-obsessed witches. And our obsession with the hero? We can end up doing horrible, horrible things because we hoodwink ourselves into thinking that's what would please him. When it comes to technology, the main question is not what humanity will develop, but either the societal effects of relying too heavily on a certain tech, or how humanity needs to ensure technology advances in a matter that actually benefits humankind.

Dune was written in the shadow of the Cold War, and while nuclear power is indeed really cool, the actual benefits of nuclear weapons are a bit mixed. Sure, there's more "peace" now thanks to the whole MAD thing, but it doesn't take much for a bunch of dumb mistakes to result in global disaster, not to mention the existence of people who want to bring about the apocalypse. We have technologies we are producing today that very well could go down a bad path; as cool as self-driving cars are, there's the societal impact of millions of drivers being put of work overnight to consider, not to mention that if governments could replace soldiers with self-driving vehicles then there'd be a lot less incentive to avoid wars. CorruptUser 15:58, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

I am a big fan of Dune by Frank Herbert. Absolutely loved it. To contrast that opinion, J.R.R. Tolkien is said to have really disliked that novel. The Rings series is unashamedly a religious fantasy. Dune is the very opposite of religious, and it is fatalistic. The second novel by Herbert, Dune Messiah, struck me to be of pulp-fiction grade; short, dashed off, sketchy, awkwardly dramatic and my disappointment with it was serious enough that I stopped reading the series. This is not an isolated view, "Brian Herbert lays out an interesting theory, which is that people hate the sequels because the "hero" side of Paul is indelibly tarnished. He is no longer the saviour of Dune, but instead the figurehead in whose name thousands of years of suffering is begun." I concur that the character arc of Paul may be a contributing factor to the public reception of the sequel. Dune was a masterpiece. The sequel was a cheap knockoff presumably issued to exploit the success of Dune.UncleKrampus (talk) 16:22, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

I always interpreted the different themes of the Dune sequels as a sort of deconstruction of the hero myth. Paul was, at first, the great savior of Arrakis. He gained the trust of the Fremen, he threw off the rule of the evil House Harkonnen and he seized the throne of the Empire. Everything there is a form of hero's journey, like Star Wars. Someone who rose from betrayal to defeat the great evil. Everything past that shows how such a person can be lead to atrocities themselves, even if they're (in their mind, anyway) for the greater good. Leto II deliberately became a horrible tyrant, hoarding spice and preventing space travel to maintain control for millennia. His entire goal was to force humanity into the Scattering to see them struggle, diversify and innovate rather than stagnate. Stagnation means a single point of failure, which will eventually mean the end of humanity. If anything, the whole thesis of the series is that you're better off thinking for yourself rather than blindly trusting a figurehead, something Leto II wanted to teach humanity. (You can also see this theme in Warhammer 40K, as one of the largest failings of the Emperor was centralizing power for himself and completely failing to trust and fully inform those under him.) All this being said, it's been a long while since I've read the books. IntrepidSkeptic (talk) 11:11, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

40K was very much influenced by Dune. Humanity ruled by a god-emperor, every planet being run by feudal warlords, interstellar travel requiring a race of hideous mutants, technology being equal parts futuristic and medieval, etc etc. But given that WH40k was also based on Warhammer, which was indirectly based on Tolkein... it's nice that both Herbert and Tolkein "worked together" on it. CorruptUser 13:13, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

Gamergate 2: First as Tragedy, then as Farce

So should we make new article about this or just add it to the timeline page? 129.219.21.114 (talk) 07:20, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

The problem I see with adding this to the "Gamergate" article is that the Sweet Baby Inc. thing (what's being made as "Gamergate 2.0" in some corners) really isn't that big, from what I can tell. After Gamergate, the "unemployed misogynistic basement dweller" gamer crowd moved to places like Kiwi Farms, parts of 4chan, and r/KotakuInAction. They have essentially been stinking up the gaming and science-fiction/fantasy media worlds since then, mass down-voting anything in online ratings that has any whiff of female, raging about woke or something in their pockets of the Internet, and reaching for their usual toothless harassment / doxxing etc. tools for anything that slights them.

Generally speaking, unless the harassment gets serious (as it has sometimes), no one cares, as most people are sick of their shit these days. Life goes on.

So, to me, it's essentially a continuation of a subculture of the Internet that has spent the last ten years raging and ranting about really dumb things. Woke Derangement Syndrome in action, as it should be called. BobJohnson (talk) 13:29, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

Streisand effect joins the chat. 166.205.159.44 (talk) 02:36, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

Best Movies of 2023 to Jeer At

I really enjoyed making fun of these films as I watched them. I will do as much as I can to not spoil them, they are great watches to go into as cynically and sarcastically as you want.

'No One Will Save You' An alien invasion thriller about a woman who cannot ask for help in the face of a loogie that she kinda deserved with nonsense resolution. The world of the main character is easy to follow without full expository moments, so that's a little refreshing.

My favorite, 'The Seeding' A story of a man who is overpowered by children and imprisoned by what we have to agree are unscalable walls, subsequently forced to live with the most domicile witch ever been conceived until 3 fingers of brown liquor makes him forget how to pull out. Thus, the titular Seeding. Absolutely hilarious once it gives itself away as a political hack piece. If you watch it and ask yourself, 'wait, is this the moment?' I promise it won't be long and it is way less nuanced than you are expecting.

'Ladyballers' which is a movie so divorced from the idea it is trying to criticize the only joke it intentionally makes is that women just generally suck. A high school basketball team ages and falls out of form, then they destroy women's sports by virtue of being high school boy's basketball players. Imagine thinking so little of women that the only point you have to make is 'being born with a penis fucking rules, brah' and you have this wild airball of a movie.

'The Windigo' was fun to jeer at, and I don't think that's because I'm not familiar with Ojibwe culture. All goofy horror is always best enjoyed this way, it was objectively better than 2022's 'Smile' but nowhere near as good as 'It Lives Inside.' But it was goofy horror and I loved cracking jokes. Dream Catchers and a branded John Deere Bulldozer are a literal combo attack, and that is not a spoiler for any resolution of the film, so I don't think it's unfair to call that goofy.

My final movie to make it a clean five is...

'The Beekeeper'. I need say nothing about it other than I applauded at what I assumed was the end, and I was deadly accurate.

It's not polite to jeer at a movie in the theater, so don't do that exactly. If you can get a watch party together for any of these films, they are really fun to watch with friends. Torrent (talk)

Mystery Science Theater 3000 was fun for watching some inspired heckling of mostly mediocre horror films. The Rocky Horror Picture Show was fun for the audience heckling back when it was shown in movie theaters. Bongolian (talk) 03:43, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

MST3K has done almost no horror films in color. The Rocky Horror Picture Show is an oversold 'everyone knows the joke' good time, and that's why it's not screened, because doing that shit in theater is not great when everyone gets a joke. If you need help watching some of these movies on stream, I am sorry, I can't help you. You would have to search them on Google, and then you'd notice a DCMA takedown. And if you checked that, you'd notice Tonga is the worst offender of holding a domain for streaming for ads over copyright law. Please remember, piracy kills industry. Also MST3k and Rifftrax have a bunch of free content on Youtube through their official channels. Nothing they've pirated, they don't do stupid shit. Torrent (talk) 12:47, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

Rocky Horror has the record for number of continuous years in limited theater release: 48 years, long enough for the original live performers to be grannies and gramps. Next showing: March 30.[13] Bongolian (talk) 17:33, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

Rocky Horror is more of a phenomenon than a bad movie riff to me. On its own, I think the movie is neither very good nor very bad - it's essentially a stage show "of its time" that didn't quite translate well to film (the last third in particular really drags). The "rituals" have kept the movie alive.

Of the MST3K alumni, Rifftrax does more modern films. The color era of horror films roughly coincided with a rise in the explicitness, so it's no small wonder that the relatively family friendly MST3K didn't do too many of them. Rifftrax is not bound by television, so they do more direct-to-video / direct-to-streaming exploitation garbage, some with a definite R rating (though even Rifftrax avoids things that are too much in this direction). I imagine this is similar for the modern make-fun-of-bad-movie crowd on YouTube and elsewhere, unless they are stuck by necessity with public domain films. BobJohnson (talk) 18:03, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

I read good things about 'The Beekeeper'. Something about a simple man defending an old lady. xD -Äxl (talk) 20:26, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

Somebody gets it xD. and also thanks for pointing out a Rocky Horror show screening, I was worried that joke wouldn't land. There are a lot of bad movies that are really tough to make jokes during. The five I've put forward are, again, movies in which you can both let go of a 'don't make fun of it because it might be serious' filter and a 'do I have time to make a joke or overall criticism?' These five are ripe. Torrent (talk) 05:59, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

Do we feel things because of "agreements"?

Title says it all, I can't post the whole thing so I have to link to the post on a thread I asked this elsewhere since it flags the post as spam due to length. Apologies for the length of the quoted text in the post.

My explanation is that if we like something we feel happy and don't like something then we feel unhappy about it. The dude I quoted might argue we agree to feel such things towards what we like and dislike, though that then begs the question of "How do you know that"? Like...I didn't agree to like or be happy about X or Y it just sort of happened, other times it's due to experience.

Anyway here it is: https://forum.centerforinquiry.org/t/do-we-control-our-emotions/10660/248

47.5.66.54 (talk) 05:02, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

So the point is life is always mixed up and our emotions happen, and whether we can or can't be part of things we try to break down into components. Not one of us is in charge of each others' emotions, that's important, but each of us is responsible to our own components over being responsible for our own lack of control. I would say, we are in a relationship between our emotions and our ability to think, rationalize, and apply causal relationship to action, and that has to be something we do to understand ourselves.

As I see it,the goal isn't to affirm yourself outside of the rest of the world, it's to see someone being frustrated or angry and recognizing that you have been there. And with time and experience, you can learn whether the emotion is justified and how to contextualize it in yourself, not in anyone else. It's why I hated the Johnny Depp v Amber Herd deal, they are both stunted and wrong, and the solution was a dollar amount. If somebody is chucking a wine bottle at somebody who is shitting themselves in their sleep and it goes to court, the question is not 'who respected the relationship enough to get money.' It's not an answer to a question that isn't being asked. And I'm not answering your question either.

We are responsible TO our emotions, not FOR them. And that is a difficult road because you can't ignore it. There are agreements you can make with yourself, but I don't think anyone must agree to feel any certain way. Torrent (talk) 10:08, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

RationalWiki:Articles for deletion/Presidential candidacy of Donald Trump

This afd has been open since the end of January. Does someone want to close it? Lavalizard101 (talk) 11:38, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

@Lavalizard101 You are a sysop in good standing, Lavalizard. There are no designated archivists here. If you believe that a consensus has been reached, jump right in! You don't have to, of course, but noticing a problem and fixing it yourself is not something you will get in trouble for. (Or, well, I won't give out to you at any rate!) If you wanna step up, just give it try. Who cares if you make a mistake? Nothing that can't be undone with a few clicks. I suspect they are reluctant because the merge is a substantial project. A lot of things to add to an already bloated article. - Rairyu75 (Talk) 12:47, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

Be bold. Justarandomliberal (talk) 12:49, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

The overwhelming vote on this afd has been to merge it with the main tRump page. Whoever closes the afd should be willing to put in the effort to do the merge. Bongolian (talk) 18:30, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

Lá Fhéile Pádraig Sona duit, motherf@ckers.

The weather looks to be shite in my neck of the woods, as it often is on this island. Not that I like going out on Paddy's day or anything. I'm a miserable indoor git so I am. Foolish natives, going out into the streets on a day like this. Awful crowds, awful traffic, awful overpriced everything. But maybe it's the awfulness that attracts them... maybe they LIKE the misery.

Anyway, it would be nice if the rain decided to feck off for a bit. Would help dry the laundry. - Rairyu75 (Talk) 04:34, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

Stay home, be awful on your own as much as you want, you sound like you already know what it's all about. 'Erin go Bragh' on a Sunday, what a miserable plan, the guys making those calendars must not have planned on how old we'd get. We've all got Monday tomorrow, it's poor planning. Laundry on a Sunday sounds like any other day to me, no day to be off your ass. If you could be having a good time, what would you do instead? Torrent (talk) 06:23, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

I want to cook something, make something special for dinner. Everything 'Irish' is stews and potatoes. Is there something you think is different from any of that 'Ireland is all stew and potatoes' that could be made? Torrent (talk) 07:50, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

I'm a blow-in Torrent. Got no clue what all the locals cook on this important occasion. But I suspect if you are getting shit-faced in the process, you are doing it right. (You are correct though, beef and potatoes is the standard, I think. Roast or stew, whatever floats your boat.)

Also, here in Ireland, it's a "Bank Holiday Monday." Most of us have tomorrow off, so it should help with the hangovers somewhat. - Rairyu75 (Talk) 12:12, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

Corned beef and cabbage is strongly associated with St. Patrick's Day in America. (This is not a native Ireland dish, it is an Irish-American adaptation of the native Irish dish bacon and cabbage.) Parts of the Internet tell me that lamb (stews or roasts) is also popular in Ireland on this day. But other parts of the Internet tell me that St. Patrick's Day is more of a drinking holiday in Ireland than anything else. So... BobJohnson (talk) 17:00, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

I did sod all due to being at work (though I'm having a drinkie on the train back). Chances are there's Champ for dinner, but that's a total coincidence. Plus, the pubs will be closed by the time I get back. KarmaPolice (talk) 21:07, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

I went with colcannon in the skin, which is called a Twice baked potato in the states. I might make hasenpfeffer for Easter, I have a deli with frozen exotic meats, Rabbit is in there. i would get no practice with the meat though. Torrent (talk) 10:28, 19 March 2024 (UTC)

My latest video

https://youtu.be/8U0zKMhEp-A?si=xgXXVphXXPlDz0M6

Vampires in Ukraine! --Trans Fem Agenda 14:04, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

Does this mean the typical pop-culture vampires or something more accurate to Slavic mythology? Luigifan18 (talk) 18:17, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

Run of the mill vampires. I don't know much about Slavic mythology. --Trans Fem Agenda 00:21, 19 March 2024 (UTC)

TikTok ban passed the House of Representatives

I just saw a Reddit post about a TikTok ban passing the House of Representatives and a bunch of concerning comments about this being used to control information and sweep warning signs of fascism under the rug. How credible is the Majority Report again? Luigifan18 (talk) 15:55, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

The bill as written isn't specifically a TikTok ban, which is actually the bigger problem. The expanded powers are likely to be abused beyond the original scope, in the future, like the PATRIOT Act. Expansion of the natsec state is generally bipartisan so it's sailed towards becoming law though. Chillpilled (talk) 16:07, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

Ironically, this is what the Chinese do (TikTok is Chinese originally). By banning foreign-owned websites such as Facebook, Google, etc, they stop American intelligence services from gaining access to data, while encourage domestic equivalents such as Baidu, WeChat, etc. Duncan from Teflpedia (talk) 00:16, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

Also ironically, US politicians are terrified of surveillance when it touches their boundaries. I don't think it's dumb to ban the app TikTok from phones with gps and cameras from Federal locations. I just think it's a little masturbatory. Torrent (talk) 07:38, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

That whole thread reminds me of why political reddit is so trash. I look at these people's comment histories and it's like these people are addicted to rage. You could try to say, "Well, the world is shit, so they deserve to be angry", but rage is only "healthy" if it spurs them into action, their rage is more personally debilitating if anything. I noticed it didn't take long for them to blame "da jooz" since anti-semitism is the cool thing for kids to do now. Also, I'm more conflicted about Tiktok being banned since I honestly identify with both sides of the argument.-Ryan1257 (talk) 18:17, 20 March 2024 (UTC)

The Majority Report is a US left-progressive podcast so you're going to get the angry left viewpoint there. :) The one point in Reddit's favor is that while it's known to "lean left", since subreddits exist, you can find the US conservative political rage and paranoia posts as well. (Not as much rage on this issue, though, since Trump does not support the ban but other Republican politicians do, so you get posts going both ways. But there's plenty of ye olde anger in other r/Conservative posts.) In addition to the "main US two political teams", there are other subreddits with various other US political raging paradigms, as well as some international subreddits that rage against completely different things altogether.

At any rate, rage-bait / rage-farming is a huge issue IMHO even in non-political major social media. It can be bemusing at times, as in when algorithmic feeds send you two articles trying to get you to rage in opposite directions (should I rage about how the economy sucks or rage about how the media is making the economy look bad? Hmm...). But it's particularly annoying most of the time, especially when you notice that so much of the rage bait is mis-truths, misdirection, old news reposts, stupid one-post-Twitter nutpicking, and whatnot. BobJohnson (talk) 19:17, 20 March 2024 (UTC)

Fundamentalists Strike at Tolkien

I found a website while searching for Tolkienology, a religion: https://sacredsandwich.com/2020/04/26/the-sad-truth-of-tolkien-spirituality/. I, myself a Roman Catholic, find it quite bizarre. I think that its another fundamentalist stunned at the idea that people have different points of view than him. ^{— Unsigned, by: GodzillaGuy / talk / contribs}

…Wasn't Tolkien a Catholic? Luigifan18 (talk) 03:29, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

And by all reports, a devout one at that. Kencolt (talk) 04:52, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

Fellow Inkling CS Lewis created Narnia with its Christian linkings, and Charles Williams (whom I have not heard of) who wrote books such as 'Descent into Hell.' Anna Livia (talk) 20:32, 20 March 2024 (UTC)

More Shit from Trump

Looks like wannabe dictator Trump is spreading lies once again. Two days ago, he held a rally in Ohio where he attempted to whitewash the people behind January 6th, as well as the same 2020 Big Lie and claims about the election. Judging by these statements, his goal seems like he to want to rule for life and be above the law. Here's the sources: [14], [15] TheEternalOutsider (talk) 08:20, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

With his bloodbath prediction, Trump wants to begin another act of domestic terrorism. Then again, he loves to start violence. --Trans Fem Agenda 14:06, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

That makes me wonder; who the hell is this going to sway? 'Ooh, I'd better vote Trump because if he don't win he'll do his best to torch the bloody place'? KarmaPolice (talk) 09:13, 19 March 2024 (UTC)

Trump's basically running (again) on a "bring out the base" strategy, and his base seems to love the ruscist whiffs of old fart faux masochism, ala a Putin. So it's less "sway your opponent" than "rally your troops".

(Mind you, since that 2016 shocker, this hasn't been the greatest electoral strategy for Republicans. Some parts of America are receptive to this bullshit, sadly, but others are not.) BobJohnson (talk) 14:13, 19 March 2024 (UTC)

Yes, which is why we can safely ignore it. The only two things we need to watch for from the Orange One is a) the effectiveness of Biden negative campaigning and b) effectiveness of attempts to court new support-bases. A related c) is watching how well 'moderate' Republicans manage to airbrush shite like this away. KarmaPolice (talk) 15:13, 19 March 2024 (UTC)

Damn, the orange-ghoul should get his bowels looked at if he is shitting this much. - Only Sort of Dumb (talk) 18:05, 19 March 2024 (UTC)

We're probably gonna see bad stuff happing either way. If Trump loses, his supporters will throw another destructive tantrum; if he wins, Project 2025 will start in earnest. I know which I'd rather see happen… Luigifan18 (talk) 20:12, 20 March 2024 (UTC)

I think I made a mess.

I think I made a mess in the blog-space-thing, can someone fix it. Koafox (talk) 16:45, 20 March 2024 (UTC)

It looks like Cosmikdebris fixed it. Bongolian (talk) 19:21, 20 March 2024 (UTC)

The feedback of the community (that means YOU, yes YOU reading this) would be greatly appreciated

There are currently 3 Articles up for deletion and 5 articles up for demotion. The latter, in particular, is a pretty lonely spot to hang out in, with mostly Cosmik and Bongolian the only users taking an interest. I get that many of you have no interest in patrolling Recent changes (cause, let's be honest, it's a pretty boring thing to look at) and thus would have no way of finding out about this, so I'm letting you all know here. You are all members of this community. It doesn't matter if you are here everyday or if you are here once every two weeks. My voice should not matter more than yours just because I am terminally online. If you have the time to read the articles in question and offer your feedback on them, it would be greatly appreciated.

And for some of our newer users, don't be shy about poking your head in and speaking your mind. We wouldn't be much of a mobocracy if only the older, more active users spoke out. Staying silent is your prerogative, and I won't judge you for it. But it should be YOUR choice, made with a full knowledge of the facts and not an unintended side effect of being left in the dark.

Have a good one. - Rairyu75 (Talk) 09:23, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

I should really hang out there more, for obvious reasons. Took a look, said my thoughts... CorruptUser 07:10, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

Armenia

Just added some bits to the Russian section of the Armenia page, especially since relations between Armenia and Russia have got more intense since the country has said it is looking to join the EU. Euromec (talk) 18:29, 21 March 2024 (UTC)

Is there an "orange" color on TV screens

Some answers on quora say it's a trick of the brain:

It’s a trick. There never was a yellow or orange color. A screen emits Red, Green, and/or Blue light (look at it with a magnifier or loupe — no yellow). Those colors make their way to your eyes, where your eye-brain sees them in a certain proportion and thinks “yellow” or “orange”.

But when I try to look it up I can't find an actual source to back this up.47.5.66.54 (talk) 05:26, 19 March 2024 (UTC)

If you drop a water droplet on your phone screen you’ll see the individual pixels are just made up of red, blue, and green. That’s why you often see the acronym RGB on many a AV system. The truth is though, the only light the human eye can actually see is just red, green, and blue. We only have cone receptors for those three colours. Dogs and Cats have blue and yellow cone receptors in their retinas. Wavelengths of light between say, red and green, stimulate both receptors and when in close proximity to each other our brain processes the colour as yellow. There is such thing as yellow and orange light though. Hence cats and dogs having yellow colour receptors. What’s really trippy is that there is actually no such thing as purple or magenta light. - Only Sort of Dumb (talk) 06:31, 19 March 2024 (UTC)

You might have trouble finding a source to back up any answer because it ends in philosophy. The question "Is there an 'orange' color on TV screens" has no answer that will please everyone. Colours are perception, and happen in your sensory system. A TV never emits a single frequency you would interpret as 'orange'. However, a colour TV is a machine designed to let you perceive that it is showing orange, or anything at all for that matter, by flashing tiny lights on a flat board. For fun: An alien with a bizarre high-speed extreme resolution non-integrating sensory system would probably look at your TV showing a beautfiul panning shot of an orange desert at sunset and say That's supposed to do that??? Namako (talk) 09:30, 19 March 2024 (UTC)

Even the "red / green / blue" cones is a simplification of the spectral response of what the three cones in the eye actually responds to (see Color vision § Physiology of color perception.) The Wiki page on the three color model many screens use is called the RGB color model. It's the model used for web page colors, too, so there are many "HTML color pickers" that allow you to directly see how much "red", "green", and "blue" combine to make actually make what you perceive as a certain color.

Interestingly enough, the RGB model inherently cannot produce all of the colors that the human eye can see. I know that the roll-out of 4K video included improvements in the "lights and shadows" (high dynamic range - HDR) and color range (wide color gamut - WCG), but a quick Google doesn't seem to tell me much on the technical details. (Edit: There's some "high level" overview in this CNET article.) BobJohnson (talk) 13:57, 19 March 2024 (UTC)

So humans can't perceive yellow light, but can perceive yellow through certain mixtures of red and green light… my head is hurting a little. Luigifan18 (talk) 14:07, 19 March 2024 (UTC)

Dude, you gotta look into how magenta doesn’t exist outside the human brain. - Only Sort of Dumb (talk) 18:01, 19 March 2024 (UTC)

I think the better way to describe this is that the colors "exist", but the light that your eye is receiving (and stimulating your color cones in your eye) is of more than one primary spectral wavelength. With something like the color "pink", for instance, your eye is receiving light waves from across the entire visible spectrum (white light), but is receiving a fair bit more of the red waves, hence making an object appear pink. Likewise, with "magenta", you are receiving light waves from the "blue" and "red" parts of the spectrum without receiving much (if any) of the "green" parts.

Yes, there's some interesting brain processing for *all* of this, so in a sense, "it's all in your head". There's plenty of electromagnetic radiation surrounding us after all, but we can only see (with our eyes) a small part of it; somehow our brains (together with these color rods in our eye) have evolved the ability to distinguish these parts into what we call "color". Different animals have different eye color rod characteristics, which means that how humans see the world is certainly different from many other animals. BobJohnson (talk) 18:37, 19 March 2024 (UTC)

What enters our physical eyes is electromagnetic radiation in various wavelengths, for which we have different cones (in our eyes) to discriminate. In our conscious perception, these wavelengths are merely represented by colors, but don't otherwise exist IRL. Short, Medium and High wavelengths, represented by blue, green and red respectively. Everything in between and outside are even more of an imagination as those three colours are. These exist when different wavelength cones are excitated at the same time - which almost always happens. The maximum and minimum excitation of all cones thereby form the spectrum of all perceptible colors, although more outside of these exist. A gamut refers to the spectrum of colors that can be recorded or displayed by, for example technical devices. Cameras use a different way of measuring electromagnetic radiation, so what they "see" is different from what we "see", since they can potentially measure wavelengths outside of what our cones can measure, AND/OR better or worse measure wavelengths inside of the visible spectrum. Cameras with the instruments to record wavelengths outside of our visible spectrum - like UV cameras - exist, which extend their gamut far beyond what we can imagine with out limited perception. ULTRACOMFY (talk) 20:37, 19 March 2024 (UTC)

In this sense we're the absolute bitches of mantis shrimp, though the worst they can do to us is break our fingers while we regularly eat them so I won't complain too much. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 22:06, 20 March 2024 (UTC)

But partly, it is ridiculous. We can see orange, it is part of the rainbow. The real fun is in considering brown. When I was in art class learning about primary colors (probably kindergarten, so it's my fault for looking into it as late as I did) I was taught that yellow and red make orange and everything mixed together makes brown. But that's a mistake, everything mixed together makes black, and black added to orange makes brown. Brown is not a color in the rainbow because it can't reasonably be created by light. And considering the fact that we naturally see wavelengths of light reflected, pigment is actually something that absorbs/reflects light, while pixeated back-lit recreations must simulate it. Brown is entirely a shade of orange. Torrent (talk) 07:48, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

Everything mixed together makes black...? ULTRACOMFY (talk) 10:05, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

For paint / pigments, sort of - mixing complimentary colors together will yield black. See the CMYK color model traditionally used in printing - mixing cyan, magenta, and yellow together will create an "imperfect" black (printing colors are not deep primary colors). The same with the "traditional" primary paint colors of red, yellow, and blue. BobJohnson (talk) 13:43, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

Ohhh I see it now! So, apparently we are talking about different things. This Adobe.com article explains really well the differences of the color models we are talking about. So, I came from the perspective of Colorimetry where black is described as the absence of light. This thought is based on what the adobe.com article refers to as an additive color model. CMYK, however, is what it describes as being a subtractive color model, ie. "ink-based" where "colors are made of light that is already passed through matieral". CMYK doesn't create "black" black in that sense, but a black that is good enough to pass as such. I assume it's the idea that a piece of paper is already white and will always be white, you just try really hard using your paint to create spots that reflect as little wavelength as possible (ie. "make" the light absent), therefore you are "subtracting" from the piece of paper you're drawing on. ULTRACOMFY (talk) 14:33, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

Yep. The ELI5 way I would put it is that additive colors are for stuff that generates light, subtractive colors are used for stuff that reflects light (like paint). No subtractive black I know of is 100% zero-light-reflections black. (Even the carbon nanotube based stuff like Vantablack still reflects a *tiny* amount of light). BobJohnson (talk) 15:51, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

We should have an article on Great Mountain Publishing

It's a bullshit conspiracy news site mostly focused on religious shit and vaccine quackery. It can be found at https://greatmountainpublishing.com/

Its endless flow of lies make me think it needs an article here. ^{— Unsigned, by: 209.18.52.50 / talk / contribs}

From what I can tell, this would be better focused on Edward Hendrie. That "publishing" site only lists one "book" not written by Hendrie, and has a lot of Hendrie blog-spew. Hendrie is mentioned in the Texe Marrs article and the flat earth article already (I think this guy's most notable for his flat earth beliefs). He seems to have written some batshit insane books. He also has another site that links to a wormhole of other kooky barely-put-together sites with Hendrie's green ink crazy spew. Very antisemitic and anti-Catholic from the get go.

A problem with this guy is that he's definitely from the "early 2000s religious nut" camp, so a lot of the best material may have bit-rotted already. I really can't find any information about who this guy actually is. I did actually find a old 2000s religious blog that, while seemingly equally nutty, was appalled by Hendrie's antisemitism. Hell, an Answers in Genesis blogger thought that Hendrie was a blatantly antisemitic asshat. BobJohnson (talk) 16:05, 20 March 2024 (UTC)

So, something that goes beyond vanity publishing into "I'll make up a front agency to throw my own works into the market, surely that'll sound respectable and nobody will notice!" Yeah, that sounds like something we can mock. I dunno how long such an article will last given the Lily Orchard debacle, though (not to mention the AFDs for VenomFangX and NephilimFree). Luigifan18 (talk) 16:38, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

JK Rowling... stuff.

Is saying that she is now spreading nazi propaganda an overstatement? https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/jk-rowling-holocaust-denialism-author Also could someone update the artical? Koafox (talk) 18:41, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

It seemed to be more in the realm of willful ignorance and/or JAQery from what I read. It's still a form of denialism I think. Bongolian (talk) 19:05, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

When I went to the X file, the link goes to a Smithsonian article. The article begins: "New Research Reveals How the Nazis Targeted Transgender People" followed by "Last year, a German court acknowledged the possibility that trans people were persecuted by the Nazis." Acknowledging a possibility is saying "could be true." It's not that far off a certainty. Certainly Nazis persecuted gay men. UncleKrampus (talk) 19:39, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

We have to recall that at the time, “transgender” wasn’t a coined term. The nazi’s likely didn’t make the distinction we do today, and falsely labeled all the sorts of people we’d classify as being LGBT+ today as being “homosexual degeneracy”. So to talk of it as merely a possibility they targeted trans people, downplays the reality. You absolutely would be targeted if you were assigned male at birth, dressed as a woman, and preferred to referred to as a woman. The Hirshfield institute wasn’t targeted despite of the advocacy of providing what we would call gender affirming care today, it was actively because of it. In addition to, the advocated acceptance of homosexuality. - Only Sort of Dumb (talk) 20:20, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

This feed into why I speak to “queerness” as a generality. Because these contemporary categories we have today to same-sex sexuality and cross-sex identification, I believe to be normal parts of human sexual variation have been interpreted under different conceptual frameworks over time. You rarely get a persecution of one, without the other. Anything that goes against the norms established by a dominant binary system for sex/gender, that deviates from what would considered typical heterosexual experience - becomes culturally suspect and other. - Only Sort of Dumb (talk) 20:29, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

Compare: The Pink Swastika. Chillpilled (talk)

Yes, this is somewhat speculative. We may well assume that trans population levels are constant over history. But that is done to make guesses possible, and is unreliable at best. Truly no Nazi used the term transgender. They were very familiar with the term for cross-dresser (transvestit). Today, a certain proportion of cross-dressers are transmen and transwomen, but not the majority it seems. We know trans people were persecuted by Nazis because we know cross-dressers were persecuted. UncleKrampus (talk) 20:55, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

Reading the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft article, in the 1920s, Magnus Hirschfeld (who founded the institute) came up with the terms "transvestite" and "transsexual". Although (again according to another Wiki article, Transvestism) Hirschfeld was not completely happy with the term, yes, this is probably what transgender individuals would have been called back in the Nazi days. Even from my personal experience, this was the typical term used for transgender people only until the last couple decades or so. (The problem with that term from a modern perspective is that the term only describes outward appearance, so non-transgender individuals like drag queens / cross-dressers get lumped in with transgender individuals).

The Nazis weren't that specific. They broadly targeted men who committed sexual acts with men [16], period, along with anti-lewd laws like Paragraph 183 that the Nazis used for targeting (among-others) cross-dressers and trans people. That meant there were some interesting gaps, eg lesbians were not prosecuted by any direct law (although of course crap did happen).[17] This is consistent with the modern era, where homosexual men and transgender women tend to be targeted a fair bit more than the reverse. BobJohnson (talk) 21:00, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

The term "transvestite" was used in some cases to refer to people wanting to change their sex characteristics at the time. I recommend this 2012 paper about it. Hirschfeld called them "extreme transvestites" or "total transvestites" to demarcate them from "mere" cross-dressers, but curiously, it seems that in most cases although this demarcation was acknowledged to have existed, usually the putuwanhrase "transvestites" was used as kind of an umbrella term the way we might say "transgender" now. Although he coined the term "transsexual", this was barely ulaised until Harry Benjamin picked it up and published "The Transsexual Phenomenon", which may itself be worth a read. Chillpilled (talk) 21:07, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

j.k. Rowling wrote resonant young adult fiction. I read ALL the books, I think they dropped off at three and I have not seen the movies. Figuring out that Harry is a horcrux and thus justa musta Been an awful entity to be around by no real fault of his dingy, whingy self, is madame author's most beautiful conceit. I was about the age of book 5 and Harry's terrible no good summer was stupid, Harry Potter was Confirmed an awful little bitch. Ms Rowling is very good at speaking to a ten year old and not much better than that. I don't think she's come to terms with that. Torrent (talk) 11:43, 19 March 2024 (UTC)

10 was the age my mother introduced me to Ursula Le Guin. Never looked back, Earthsea is still a favorite and I've read through both Lavinia and The Lathe of Heaven; plenty more to go. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 19:57, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

I read the whole C.S. Lewis, I read 'a Wrinkle in Time' but my mom didn't wasn't me to read past the first story. I never got to read any Le Guin in my prime reading days. But I do really appreciate the Omelas parable and I really need to set aside some time to read Earthsea. I read the Hobbit but not the Lord of the Rings, I was like 8 and it made a lot of sense to me. The Potter series was the only bunch of books I read past about 12 because my mom kept handing them to me after she read them. I read Where the Red Fern Grows at about 9 and bawled my eyes out, it came up as 6th grade reading and we watched the movie? In the year 2000, the teachers were like 'these kids can't read a book, we gotta show em the movie or it won't make sense.' And that's how it went, but we didn't really have English teachers, we had 'Reading' classes. English lit was a little different, but I could not gives damn about Chaucer cause I had just started fuckin. Euro lit was actually a little different, we read Tartuffe aloud in class. Where was the term cuckold in your vocabulary in 2005? Anyway, public education is really bad, I know my cousins grew up being read the Potter saga as bedtime before they had to read it themselves. I don't have any spoon fed Potter saga, it wasn't cool til the movies, so much like pokemon, it was just something I was reading, I raw dogged the lit from start to finish. I choose my own house, I don't take some quiz to sort me. Hufflepuff, HufflePUFF, HUFFLEPUFF!

Condensed, It's been tough to read a novel since I finished the Potter series and said to myself 'But I don't know why I had to read this'. Torrent (talk) 11:44, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

Old new requesting auto-confirmation

Hi,

I had an account on this website last year DietResearcher, I created two good articles, one was Paul Saladino. I left my account last year because I was studying for University (I studied food science). I don't remember my old account password, it's been a year since I was active. There are two new articles I want to create on this website for others who are pushing food woo quackery. I appreciate if I could have access for auto-confirmation so I can create this article later tonight.

I realize users may be suspicious but I am not an impersonation, spoof or troll. You can heavily watch what I am doing. I would like to create the article later today if possible. DietResearcher1 (talk) 12:50, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

It'll cost ya, we're easily bribed. Cardinal Chang (talk) 18:21, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

Feminist Ethics, Epistemic Responsibility, and Scientific Skepticism.

During my master’s program so far I have been sort of writing quite a bit on epistemic responsibility, epistemic justice, and the harms of inferences based on insufficient evidence. I am kind of curious to how these issues relate to the concerns we have as a community about anti-science, but also, an intuition I have is that these issues intersect heavily with feminist ethics. I think that intersection maybe under-explored, but I am curious what others think about that. - Only Sort of Dumb (talk) 23:14, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

The phrase "feminist ethics," suggests a class of ethics that is underdetermined through the use of "feminist" as a modifier because it suggests a bias in favor of some feminist schema. Isn't there a bunch of different theories? Are you presuming that there is a correct one? I don't imagine that feminist ethics are better distinguished than are general ethics. Honestly, I can say one should treat a woman as one would want to be treated-- an obvious a corollary of the Golden Rule. I'm not denying feminist ethics exist, I just don't see how they diverge from general ethics in any non-trivial way. I don't think this wiki has an article on the subject. UncleKrampus (talk) 00:25, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

You may be misusing the term "underdetermined" in this context. Underdetermination means that it is more open-ended to various compatible interpretations (which may be what you are trying to allude to), rather than being particularly biased towards a specific interpretation (but in that sense all of ethics is "underdetermined"). That is what people mean about the underdetermination of data, that it is not determinate to a specific interpretation, that there isn't a direct inference from the observation to the theory. Feminist ethics does imply to some capacity that whatever ethical theorizing amounts to, it needs to be feminist. It may be less "underdetermined" then general moral philosophy. I understand what you are getting at though. There isn't some universal correct notion of feminist ethics that is being appealed to here.

Feminist ethics within the philosophy may be framed as ethical theories concerned with or opposed to sexist exploitation and oppression. From an intersectional framework, you may take feminist ethics as being particularly concerned about sexist oppression as it intersects with other forms of oppression, i.e. racism, ableism, etc.; and how this may complicate certain ethical issues.

In practice, what feminist ethics actually amounts to something different is the criticism it provides to moral philosophy as a whole, with a particular tradition of approaching ethics from the idea that there is some capital "R" reason, or "view from nowhere" that can be used to infer "objective ethical truths" from. That the history of excluding women (and other minorities) from the practice of ethical theorizing creates ideological blindspots or oversights, that may bias an ethical theory against certain disadvantaged people. Some would even claim that it undermines the very aim of having an objective or accurate moral theory in of itself because the exclusion of certain minorities already biases the project from the outset. That is why the "feminist" "modifier" is taken as necessary, that there is something arguably being improved upon given the dominant mode of ethical theorizing is demonstrably androcentric. Take "the golden rule", as an example from Kantian ethics, and look in particular to how Kant viewed women in terms of their ability to engage in ethics. The assumption that men were the ones who had the capacity of this Capital "R" reason while women lacked this ability, meant in that women couldn't do genuine moral philosophizing from the outset. - Only Sort of Dumb (talk) 00:39, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

As a resource explaining what feminist ethics amounts to [18] - Only Sort of Dumb (talk) 00:39, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

And in that first paragraph from the SEP we have "That commitment results in a tendency, in feminist ethics, to take into account empirical information and material actualities." I think this illustrates a little bit of what I am getting at, given that scientific skeptics probably also believe that ethics needs to take into account empirical information and the material actualities of living human beings. My point is I think there is more of an overlap of interests rather than conflict, despite the reputation for sexism that scientific skepticism often has. These views can be reconciled, and I would argue should be reconciled. Ratiwki is an interesting case because we are a community based around scientific skepticism, that is also very sympathetic to, and often very explicitly pro-feminist. - Only Sort of Dumb (talk) 00:43, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

That's exactly what I meant by underdetermined. I wasn't referring to a particular bias. I wondered if you were doing just that. The project of feminist ethics, as it stands apart from general ethics: "feminist ethicists aim to understand, criticize, and correct: (1) the binary view of gender, (2) the privilege historically available to men, and/or (3) the ways that views about gender maintain oppressive social orders or practices that harm others, especially girls and women who historically have been subordinated, along gendered dimensions including sexuality and gender-identity."

The consequence of such definitions, as I see it, is that the project itself is not epistemic but rather political. Politics is, of course a species of philosophy. One can criticize, but not correct the general public with theories. (1) Can argument eliminate the existential social realities of binary gender? The two sets are likely incommensurable, leading to more than one possible narrative. (2) Privilege is itself a form of currency afforded individuals by custom and essential differences, and resembles an economic system rather than a principled ethical theory. (3), social oppression due to gender distinctions is a species of unethical behavior not treated in general ethics due to the variety of meanings associated with social oppression. The main, material oppressions are economic by definition (e.g., pay disparities). The fact that oppressed people can be considered as a class is useful in politics, less clearly so in epistemology.

This all suggests political philosophy is being brought to bear, or at least I suppose that is the practical consequence of it. Still, one may consider political epistemology. This does intersect with the social ideas you may have in mind. Often, political ideas are intractable and even more often, undecidable. UncleKrampus (talk) 02:14, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

As the philosopher may point out the project of ethics itself is ethical, not epistemic, and the project of ontology, is ontic, not epistemic. But if we are going to assert something like an ethics of belief, which is what the notion of epistemic responsibility amounts to, then it is possible for there to be both a dimension of the epistemic and that of the ethical. I am not entirely convinced that there is a way in which anyone can engage in a notion of ethics without inadvertently engaging with a notion of politics. There is no such thing as an ethical theory that does not itself have political implications, because no ethical theory is without implications about the distribution and exercise of power.

Epistemology itself has within in sub-disciplines of feminist and social epistemology. If we truly run with the notion that knowledge is power (at least a type of power, or is in some sense empowering) then politics will inevitably bare on the epistemic. Social systems determine what information is accessible. Ignorance is something that can be produced or maintained (think state secrecy, misinformation produced by states and corporate institutions, etc). Even science itself is dependent on funding, and to receive public funding scientists often have to pitch how their work is of benefit to society. The generation of knowledge, and its suppression comes down to the capacities of individuals and the social systems that grant them. Scientific skepticism itself is rarely politically neutral, we often make calls upon the regulation of alternative medicine, or push to have psychics accountable for fraud, etc. This very website itself has its origins in political tension, namely in that of conservative anti-science, the political associations of creationism, and the ideological motivations behind climate denial. - Only Sort of Dumb (talk) 03:00, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

so first, I want to say Don't ask the internet for criticism if you're doing a Masters'. That's not a question, it is very similar to Critical Race Theory, which is very essentially bonkers in that it questions whetheter all historical accountsare biased (which, come on, that's the easy one to admit as a person existent as a white man), and it is also strange, historical stories about race, gender, and ethics that don't include a not even a Christian, but a female, black, brown, red, or yellow, perspective; each minority are put down as some bunk critical history theory. You'll have to deal, it's not exactly written down, and that's not something I can help with.. Helping by being a decent man, we exist. The ideas of unburying history by means of unpublished works is really ambitious. I'm forever in your corner Torrent (talk) 10:10, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

I wasn’t asking for criticism, just asking for opinions about related topics. Also this topic isn’t about “critical theory”. I am approaching this almost entirely from the analytical tradition of philosophy, not legal studies scholarship. You are getting various academic disciplines confused for one another here. I am not trained as a critical theorist, I am not talking about critical theory. Though it should be said that of the literature I read on critical thinking, some scholars do take critical theory as simply being an extension and application of critical thinking. If that is correct then I would argue there is an element of anti-intellectualism going on with your post. Unsurprising considering how associated critical race theory is with certain republican moral panics. - Only Sort of Dumb (talk) 20:09, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

Daggers, you've stabbed me to pieces. Torrent (talk) 11:13, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

My apologies, wasn’t my intent. I was just trying to persuade you away from such knee jerk reactions and put you in a mindset to be more willing to reflect upon where these assessments come from. Like, why upon hearing feminist ethics did you think critical theory? I hope not to mislead you into thinking critical theory is completely irrelevant to feminist ethics, but there are plenty of scholars who work within such a field who do, in fact, reject many aspects of critical theory, while others may be more so inspired by it. Arguably, Kimberlé Crenshaw who mainstreamed the concept of intersectionality, is described as a critical race theorist. She is also a legal scholar, however, and upon describing the concept the intended audience was other legal scholars. Not gender studies, feminist philosophers, or other academics as a whole. But the influence is no doubt present within other disciplines. - Only Sort of Dumb (talk) 17:43, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

sorry for not getting back timely, but What I meant is I actually think you answered my comment really well. I meant what I said, my point was much less relevant to what you are working on and more a lateral statement of how anyone against the sole idea of there being such a thing as agency across all genders and races will argue. Because they will, and they do it constantly and boneheadedly, and I don't know how to crack that kinda 'anything but critical' thinking. Again, in your corner, on your side. I believe in your work and I respect your opinion. I was just kinda joking that yes, you nailed it. Guillotine, you're the boss, speak further on it if you can because I legitimately like it. Torrent (talk) 08:07, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

Assuming the Worst of People

This is something I have felt myself get into again and again over the years, where due to poor treatment (mostly due to the education system) and reading up on some psychology, I have assumed the worst of many people on this planet, assuming they all act out of selfishness, greed, or more. See the Dark Triad of personality traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. A fourth trait, sadism, is sometimes included with the other three to form the Dark Tetrad.

As I iterated to myself before, the narcissism gives them the psychological push and reasoning to do what they do and making them as tenacious as ever, the Machiavellianism gives them the means to achieve their goals no matter the damage it does, the psychopathy removes any and all roadblocks to their efficiency (usually in the form of ethics, which they see as the roadblock) in achieving their goals, and the sadism is their raison d'être and reward mechanism for why they still go about their lives, as the glee extracted from the suffering of others becomes their reward for their behavior. This cycle of selfishness and power only feeds back into itself, and I suspect large swaths of the most vocal people and those in power are like that, only acting to boost their own egos.

It's quite a lot, but that's just something I want to get out there. TheEternalOutsider (talk) 13:46, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

It is only in our nature to tribalize the world as we know it. We are the good, they are the bad. It is very common. We have the racists, and the better people; the sexists, and the better people; the homophobes, and the better people, etc. While some people are better than others with regard to their empathic relations with others, it is sobering to accept the reality that everyone eventually belongs, for a time, to one of the worse groups. The best advice I can give is beware of catastrophizing. If people are generally bedeviled by negative personal qualities, then as a person, I must assume that I am also in need of improvement.UncleKrampus (talk) 14:27, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

It appears human brains have a hardwired ''negativity bias'; and this includes being much more liable to remember 'poor treatment' from others than fair dealing. It is most likely a defence mechanism; to counteract the general 'free rider problem' that all societies suffer from as well as guarding against individual screw-overs. It also appears that we are not the only species who has this; corvids such as crows and ravens do too.

There is also the little issue that some societies on this planet are either toxic or at very least fairly 'sick'; that despite the surface claims, the 'rewarded' behaviours are negative and/or damaging to wider society. A good example is that of Donald Trump; a kid who was taught openess and empathy were weaknesses, a teenager shown that you can buy your way out of any problem, a young adulthood tutored that screwing-over business partners was a viable strategy and an older man who knows walking on people's spines to get whatever you want will neither be stopped or called out. And it is difficult to tell an American child that those traits/views are wrong the moment you see his 'achievements'.

Lastly, I will caution you that basing general theories on human nature from observations at school is not wise. School is a hyper-competitive, unfair enviroment with screwed-up goals, riddled with hypocrisy, an emotional hot-house and works hard to crush originality and you cannot escape it. Trying to draw conclusions on how humans normally operate from that is like how biologists came up with the 'alpha wolf' theory on seeing how a bunch of wolves acted when shoved together in a zoo pen and thinking wolf-packs are like that in the wild [ie not at all]. KarmaPolice (talk) 15:34, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

Encountering and observing the never-ending circus of the heavily enshittified Internet was another thing that continues to conjure negativity and cause these assumptions. Forgot to mention that. TheEternalOutsider (talk) 17:02, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

I don't believe that is a coincidence. The likes of Xi, Putin et al ['at home and abroad'] want us to be at each other's throats, to not trust anyone, to not believe in anything positive, to feel alone, that everyone is a selfish [redacted] only out for themselves, to loathe Others etc. Divide and rule, with us all smothered under a blanket of depressing apathy, mainlining anger and resentment or turning inwards into OwnLife and ignoring it all. KarmaPolice (talk) 17:26, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

KP gave a useful example of a positive result of negativity bias in action. We are motivated to derive explanations for unpleasant facts. Very good. If we imagine the mind as a machine, then it is easy to comprehend the idea of data overload. There is no end of negative information and opinions available through media. Negativity is the message of interactive social media. The trick for you may be to just stop attending to it at your present rate. The negativity bias is like an AI assistant that selects ominous impressions from ones recent experience. It prompts questions such as, "this looks bad" for some reason, and "better think about a possible consequence." I often catch myself attending to very negative media, and decide to turn it off for its lack of utility. Try it, there's a lot of fun things to do.UncleKrampus (talk) 17:39, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

That's basically what social media AIs do; it notes 'oh, you looked at X' and then offers you more and more of X, shoving wafer thin mints into you until you explode. It's important to remember that fact; they are designed to be mental catnip so you keep on viewing them ads and over time, to build up a virtual picture of you so they can sell on your analytics to third parties. But yes; I also 'ration' social media, in a similar manner to how I ration news. KarmaPolice (talk) 18:42, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

There's probably an evolutionary component to negativity bias, too; people who reacted to bad things happening by getting upset and trying to stop the bad stuff were more likely to live longer and have more kids than people who kept themselves in a state of blissful ignorance or passive endurance. Luigifan18 (talk) 23:59, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

But that's an 'ends' problem, on a social level. The person who gets angrier than you gets the seat. It reinforces the idea of hierarchy. On it's face, it justifies a man having many wives. In practice, you get Mitt Romney. Being angry for no reason is a dumb trick people with power use. Torrent (talk) 09:10, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

Is artificial general intelligence already here?

Two researchers argue that artificial general intelligence is already here:

https://www.noemamag.com/artificial-general-intelligence-is-already-here/

What do you think of the article? One of the authors works for Google, so I suspect that there is a conflict of interest going on here. Cuz I know that Big Tech companies love to hype their AI stuff. This was an assigned reading for a philosophy course I'm taking. AyeAight (talk) 06:48, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

There's no single definition of AGI, so whether it's been achieved is in the eye of the beholder. Current level chatbots seem to pass the weird-but-stoopid test, and the could-be-crazy-uncle-QAnoner tests. Bongolian (talk) 07:07, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

If it has been passed, it's kinda underwhelming TBH. Reality's a cold hard cynic... Carthage (talk) 07:11, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

We'll know it's here when they enslave us. --Annanoon (talk) 11:36, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

"Large language models" operate at the level of a stochastic parrot. They have vast depth of text to trawl through, but no concept of actual reasoning / deduction and no novelty of thinking. So no, not really, unless we are talking about the parts of humanity that get awed by the bullshit artist.

In 2013, a Google engineer claimed to USA Today that fully autonomous self-driving cars were five years away. You can nitpick and say this was "technically correct" (since there are some limited self-driving cars out there in select environments) but compared to the 2010s self-driving hype cycle... well, let's just say that "truck driver" is still a viable job for quite the near future, eh? BobJohnson (talk) 12:37, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

From my layperson's general understanding; no. I've long said that AIs are a misnomer; they are not 'intelligent'. BobJ is [not for the first time] right on the money - the 'AIs' we currently have are not much more than a new iteration of computer program with much bigger data-sets, more processing power and lastly, a very good 'user interface'. As all of these have been developing since the first Colossus was switched on in 1943, it can be said firmly that this is 'nothing new under the sun'. A 'true AI' is decades, perhaps centuries away - and even when we finally do see one, it's most likely it shall be dumb as shit. KarmaPolice (talk) 13:47, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

The problem I see (alluded to in the RW article on artificial general intelligence, and also by Bongolian) is that the term itself is indeed not well defined. Since the Silicon Valley hype cycle has kicked in, the old school definition (which was essentially equivalent to a human brain or greater, and required fluency in multiple concepts that are known human brain traits, including reasoning / problem solving, learning under uncertain conditions, imagination, etc.) has been fudged. Every tech bro is hyping up LLMs these days.

From my point of view, that NOEMA article was rather insulting. It acknowledged the criticisms (of which I am one of the critics :) ), but in the end concluded that such criticism was made "through the lens of economic threat and insecurity". Uh-huh. It's more like, we've heard this tech hype cycle song and dance before. I don't disagree that there won't be economic impact, but just as the truck drivers are not out of work yet, I currently expect the impact to be less than the hype given the limitations of technology. (Though obviously there will be some, and has been already, since AI can do some "boilerplate" type things, like write junk news articles designed to fill up space, to enough satisfaction. A clickbait-tuned AI designed to populate your Facebooks with yet even more rage bait for doom-scrollers? Entirely possible! But even in journalism, ChatGPT is *not* going to do the type of deep investigatory reporting that's far more valuable than your boilerplate news of the day.)

I also expect *some* economic impact from "the other angle", where decisions made to over-rely on AI technology causes significant problems later on. Think Boeing (let's add a computer (MCAS) to mimic previous 737s, and we won't need to retrain pilots, right? Wrong.) or the noted issues with Tesla's "autopilot". One possibility I can think of as easily plausible is creative execs replacing talent with LLM AI, which (if implemented not as a supplement, but as a way to replace humans) will most likely lead to a crash in quality. BobJohnson (talk) 14:44, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

Which is the reason I have started using the term 'Virtual Intelligence' [from Mass Effect]; that we are very close to the stage where a sufficiently complex LLM [with simulated personality, views, prefrences etc as well as a large amount of 'previous conversations' under it's belt] will be able to routinely pass the classic Turing Test without actually being 'sentient'. I expect we shall reach this point within a decade; as in 'almost all adult humans cannot tell that their virtual assistant etc is not a human from their actions/speech alone'. In fact, in the respect of small kids, I suspect we're already rather close...

https://www.wunc.org/science-technology/2023-08-14/how-kids-view-smart-home-devices-roomba-pet-alexa-friend

KarmaPolice (talk) 17:25, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ I reworked/wrote our current text on AGI. I included a reference to that NOEMA article, and I thought it seemed representative of the best that LLM-AGI boosters have to offer. The thing I disagree with the strongest is the vague claims made that the best LLMs already can do basically all human information processing, so that by extension AGI has clearly been achieved already. To me, it requires a very lopsided view of human information processing to accept that claim of what LLMs can do, and it points to that such people view human intellectual capability very differently than the skeptics -- this may be more significant than differences in how LLMs are viewed. This seems similar to older ages of AGI hype, when likewise oversimplified ideas of the human mind led to assertions that AGI was on the cusp of being achieved. This isn't about anything mystical (such boosters like to criticize mystical criticism of their hype), rather about the broader accepted empirical understanding of the human mind (which grew in the age of cognitive science).

Current LLMs are plainly already truly super-human in a way, but at the same time like only a cross-section of a hypothetical AGI. A little bit like an oversized language machinery without the rest of a human mind to go along with it. Think of a 3D space, in which a flat 2D object can grow in size but it remains flat compared to a solid object. Boosting the size and learning of LLMs makes a flat thing taller and wider, and it is already much more so than a moderately sized lump representing human cognition. But the latter has size in another dimension, and that's the crucial difference. People can be bamboozled by words and simulated rote memorization into forgetting that difference, but it shows up whenever the memorization doesn't cover what's tested. --ApooftGnegiol (talk) 20:11, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

Forget about the nukes, she is Putin's most important asset

Putin's secret weapon. Far more competent than any general

Many analysts predicted that the Russian economy would crumble with all the sanctions. Two years after the war, their economy is performing better than most people thought. Why? There are many reasons for that (countries like India, China and Brazil buying their stuff for instance), but having on his side Elvira Nabiullina, the most competent Central Bank chairperson in the world, is IMO the main reason why Russia hasn't collapsed so far. Their future is bleak: while they aren't a war economy yet, one of the reasons why their output is growing are their war efforts, but in the short term the Russian economy is not going anywhere. She raised and cut interest rates in a perfect timing, something that the West failed to do (as the 2021–2023 inflation shows). Now she's managing the convert Russian reserves in assets that the West cannot confiscate. This is not the first time she saves Putin's ass. During the 2014 annexation of the Ukraine, the Rouble almost collapsed, but while their economy didn't grow, it didn't collapse either (this was also a time when the oil price halved). The good news is, leaders like Putin often have relatively little patience with hawks like Nabiullina (see what happened Schacht in 1939), and I won't be surprised if he fires her if she denies him what he wants. GeeJayK^{Where all evil dwells} _{Where every lie is true} 14:32, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

Those 'analysts' were mainly engaging in wishful thinking, who were bigged up by the Wests' politicos because they were telling us the story we wished to hear - aka that the moment we cut some economic lifelines, the Russians would fall over and so we would not need to back Ukraine for long in a fighting war.

Who were these analysts [I don't think 'most' of them thought they would work alone]? I mean, what a bunch of morons; have they not heard of 'North Korea', 'Iran' or even 'Cuba'? Were they not aware that the majority of Russia's exports were going to places like India and particularly China - both of which were exempt from these silver bullet embargoes? Had they never heard of 'countertrades' to avoid using their limited USD reserves for imports? Didn't they notice that China could [and is] supply(ing) the vast majority of Russia's needs now? Didn't they realise that the vast bulk of Russian overseas cash fled to Gulf banks because they moved so frigging slowly to freeze it? Did they not twig that the main exports of Russia do not require much capital or advanced plant to operate, and they can use their considerable hard currency holdings to evade sanctions to illicitly purchase the gear they need to have? Or that the Russians themselves could make use of various makeshift/expediency decisions to 'keep the [economic] show on the road'? Lastly, didn't they work out that Putin does not give one jot of making the Russian people stuffer a retarded SoL so he can have his dreams of being 'Vladimir the Great of the Third Russian Empire'?

They didn't think of these things because they were not economists. Their finance myopia told them if you cut off Russia from world cash flows [a very leaking 'cut off' at that] they'd fall over quicker than if someone froze your bank accounts - but in their ignorance they didn't know the word 'autarky'. I also suspect most were of a neoliberal bent who wanted to believe themselves that they could literally 'stop wars'. Sanctions were helpful, yes; but they never 'work' in the respect of making a country actively change their course. KarmaPolice (talk) 15:40, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

Call them stupid, but the problem is outside of military options, economic options are really the main (and in my opinion, the only) "bloodless" tools in the chest that developed economies have that may some effect on deterring a leader from taking a certain action. The problem is, once that tool has been used, it's adapted around, and soon, the only option you have is back to military.-Ryan1257 (talk) 18:53, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

I'm calling them 'stupid' because they were being touted as a silver bullet in 'stopping the aggression'. They're not. Plus, I'm kinda pissy right now that 'the West' has generally not pulled it's finger our of their arses re: expanding arms industries, building up strategic stockpiles, strengthening reserves etc. If this is a game of Monopoly, Putin and Xi are rushing round the board buying up shit while we're still dicking about whether we should be the iron or boot. KarmaPolice (talk) 19:10, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

Yeah, I'm yet to see a regime collapse because of sanctions (though I've seen regimes getting more and more repressive because of them). They just make the lives of the people living in these countries even more miserable. Though I think the main point of the sanctions in Russia were to make Putin's war effort weaker, which clearly failed too, unfortunately. GeeJayK^{Where all evil dwells} _{Where every lie is true} 13:19, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

I think the sanctions have retarded the Russian war machine - most obviously in advanced microchips [as important for modern war as rubber was in WW2] but also it's partial exile from SWIFT. The sanctions are also a general 'red flag' meaning a lot of Western/Japanese corps in non-sanctioned sectors have decided to quit operations/trading. Is Russia still getting TSMC chips, Mazak laser-cutters, Glenfiddich whiskey and Mercedes-Benz parts? Sure. But they're having to resort to the grey/black market which is naturally, a lot more expensive - meaning they are getting less for their cash. And as they're generally getting less cash in because a) a lot of their production is now in military gear and b) India/China are buying Russian raw materials at a discount meaning they have less cash period too. The sanctions are limiting the amount of gear such as advanced machine parts, which is hindering the expansion of their domestic arms industry. Lastly, the general 'cash shortage' means Putin can't be as free as he used to in bribing others; be it domestically to shore up public support or other klepto dictators. Now, Russian finances in general are opaque as hell but I'm fairly sure they're running a fairly serious budget shortfall right now and while their cash-stash is considerable, it won't last forever. Even more importantly, war spending does not really add to the productive capacity of a country, and I'd be shocked if a lot of this spend was being diverted from normal investment [such as replacement of plant reaching the end of it's life-span] which means over time Russia's economic capacity will slowly decline.

In the former case, 'making people's lives more miserable' is partly a good thing because Putinism's 'secret sauce' was basically, 'don't question me or my power and in return you'll get an okay-ish SoL and be left alone to live your own life'. I recall that in Nazi Germany all those 'anti-Nazis' only appeared out of the woodwork when rationing started to bite, the Allies were bombing the Reich flat and their own families took casualties. If we end up with a Russia where the 'comfortable apparatchik class' is on short rations, the state is interfering with your personal life, SoL is stagnating, it's fairly hard to leave and there's lots of grieving people who can't even talk about it - good. It will make it harder for Russians to ignore the Czar and his corrupted evil cronies. KarmaPolice (talk) 21:08, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

Someone who should rot in prison

https://news.sky.com/story/amp/briton-who-flew-to-join-russian-forces-in-ukraine-insists-he-is-not-a-terrorist-13102771

A British national flew to Ukraine to fight alongside the Russian military. He already has a criminal record that landed him in a UK prison for five years on terrorism charges. I hope he goes back to the United Kingdom where he can be put back behind bars; where he belongs. A traitor to his country.

That would be like a United States citizen going to fight alongside the Taliban. --Trans Fem Agenda 22:45, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

Not exactly as the UK is not at war with Russia - a better analogy would be say an UK citizen trying to join the N Vietnamese military in 1967. Now, it is technically a crime (has been since the Victorian era) but there hasn't been prosecutions under it since (I think) Ww1. I fully expect such a person shall be questioned very closely on their arrival back to Blighty (including trying to work out if he was involved in war crimes etc). KarmaPolice (talk) 11:07, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

Where would 'mercenaries and similar' fit into this discussion, as there have been various such in the recent past (then Rhodesia and various other places in Africa come to mind, though I do not remember the details and names). Anna Livia (talk) 14:05, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

'Mad Mike Hoare' was who I was trying to think of. Anna Livia (talk) 14:10, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

Basically, it's all about what you join; if it's an official state outfit you're not going to be charged for it (at least not by itself). If it isn't, there may be charges - this is the 'terrorism charges' mentioned above. Clearly, back then he joined some pro-Russian militia or something - I recall folks getting charged (but not being prosecuted) for going to fight ISIS in Kurdish militias back in '18/'19. KarmaPolice (talk) 14:26, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

What matters most in life….according to Dennis Prager? (A critique)

Hello Rat community. I felt I should drop this video in here as this was presented to me during a group presentation some time ago and could need a little help in critiquing it. I’ve never been the biggest Prager fan certainly but I’m having a bit of a hard time debunking his moral dilemma arguments.SensaurC-137 (talk) 17:06, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

A) It's very much a stupidly simplistic binary argument. "Almost everything that is wrong with the world comes from people either not having higher moral values, or not living by them". So, to use a recent example, that Baltimore bridge collapse was clearly the result of bad morality... somehow. :p

B) Morality is not defined in this video except through a few simple binaries (such as murder and stealing). However, as one look at the RationalWiki Dennis Prager page, there are many things that Prager justifies as "morally" right or wrong that there is considerable disagreement on the topic. By framing things as a "moral value", Prager attempts to replace debate with a simplistic argument from authority.

Prager is an ex-Orthodox Jew who aligns firmly with the Christian Religious Right, and has been critical of seemingly any demographic other than the above (gays, liberals, Muslims, people of any color, etc.); he flits with a peculiar white supremacy that also (historically curiously) contains Jews. Quite a few people would consider his positions on such subjects wrong and immoral. Prager has also endorsed Donald Trump (Say, what does Prager think about him committing adultery by fucking a porn star?). Prager has pushed back against health care reform in the United States (plenty I can say about *that* system that could be called immoral). Prager has spewed off plenty of COVID-19 denialism [19] (giving your listeners deadly advice isn't exactly "moral", is it?) Prager's views on rape are frankly repulsive, and (in a flip-twist) his views on pornography actually pissed off Focus on the Family. (Well.)

Of course, I'm sure he thinks he is morally right on all of these issues, because he says so, right? BobJohnson (talk) 17:45, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

Visiting Kentucky

Is it save for me (a trans person ) to visit Kentucky for a week? Any precautions I should take? Koafox (talk) 15:07, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

I am not aware of any excessive level of violence against LGBT in Kentucky compared to other states. Republicans in Kentucky certainly have been doubling down on anti-trans legislation, but it's worth noting that a lot of Kentucky residents don't support these laws. Big cities and tourist areas should be okay, I imagine. I'm not familiar enough with Kentucky "off the beaten path" small towns to comment there, unfortunately.

Googling, at this time, due to specific laws pushed by Ron DeSantis, the only state I would say a trans person should *not* travel to at this time is Florida. (A lot of the rural Deep South *is* pretty dicey to Others, but even in the South many cities are actually quite okay when it comes to LGBT friendliness...) BobJohnson (talk) 16:36, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

I think the most important question is; 'do you pass' [or perhaps, 'how far do you pass']? Being trans is to a major extent a life lived in the toupee fallacy; that you only get the shite if a) you out yourself or b) you don't pass [which is why transmen are basically invisible to the Big Public]. The other major issue I can foresee if you're planning to do stuff which involves needing ID and yours don't match up. Not that I'm actually asking these questions, mind. KarmaPolice (talk) 16:58, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

So if I pass (I've been told that I do by my family), I'll be fine. Koafox (talk) 18:33, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

Even then, you'd be less likely to run into issues depending on the establishment, such as a supermarket vs. a bar-Ryan1257 (talk) 18:57, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

Personally, I would be more wary of randos than the businesses themselves. However, it may be an idea to stick with big brand/chains for dining out etc; 'Bob's Burgers' might not give a crap about harassing you if you used the 'wrong' bathroom [or allowing said rando to get away with it], but the likes of say, Five Guys might be more aware of the possible national fallout of it. Though I do wonder whether there's some LGBT version of the old Green Book... KarmaPolice (talk) 20:43, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

I mean, yes, you should be safe. Where in Kentucky, and what do you want to do while you're there? My great grandfather was from Paducah, but he was a teacher by profession and you know what being exposed to lots of kids from different families does to a guy. Tolerance, pa-tuey (that's the sound I make when I spit out of disgust). I would be a little hesitant to walk into a bar there by myself, cis male with hippie long-hair, I would be silent about my politics, and I would just pay attention to any groups of guys that get quiet. You'll be fine, the problems always happen at bars. Torrent (talk) 08:34, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

Huh. I already knew from watching The Sopranos that large corporations are less prone to kowtowing to protection rackets than smaller businesses. I guess another advantage they have over mom-and-pop shops is a greater tendency to refrain from gross antisocial behaviors that are virtually guaranteed to have a negative impact on public relations, such as naked bigotry. (Not that corporations tend to have squeaky-clean human rights records, but they at least have the sense to draw the line somewhere.) Luigifan18 (talk) 23:51, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

These days, "money is green" (for us US folk anyways :) ) to a corporation regardless of where it comes from. So many corporations not only tolerate LGBTQ+, at times they see it as an important "niche" marketing segment... particularly these days. One of the first companies I remember being banded around in the "business case study" type of way on this sort of thing was Subaru, who in the 1990s successfully targeted lesbians (in "code", of course) with their advertisements. The 1990s were *much* more homophobic than now, so this sort of thing is far more common these days. That being said, corporations are always going to be welcoming "at a distance", wanting your money above all, of course, with the rest being window dressing. "Mom and pops" will contain both worse as well as better, there may be some overtly bigoted places, but also some small businesses more involved in the community in a LGBTQ+ positive direction.

There's plenty of "LGBTQ+ guides in XYZ" websites, the web is the new "green book" in this manner, and as a quick exercise I was able to Google websites and Reddit threads with a lot of information on Kentucky. I think any LGBTQ+ will be fine in the big cities (Louisville and Lexington), which have decent scenes. Rural areas... "be cautious" and research. Even many rural conservatives don't give two hoots about a tourist's gender orientation, but it only takes one asshole to ruin things. It is amusing to also note that for all the backwards homophobic laws coming from the Republicans in Kentucky, even their official tourism department website has an entire section for LGBTQ+ travelers. BobJohnson (talk) 01:14, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

I lived in KY for a while. Louisville, or at least the New-Lou and the rest of the east side, are probably safe for LGBT people. Stay away from the west side if you are LGBT. Or straight. That area is just bad. CorruptUser 05:28, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

Action Idaho page?

Should Action Idaho have a page? Koafox (talk) 16:50, 29 March 2024 (UTC)

They seem kind of minor, it seems like some thingy created by a Boise State professor? I don't see many articles on them.

Claremont Institute, the group that funded the professor, would IMHO be a better target for an article, given their direct connection to the 2021 U.S. coup attempt and their turn towards white nationalism, Christian nationalism, and authoritarianism during the Trump years. They were once a small kind of obscure Reagan-esque Republican think tank, but post-Trump, they've gone insane, even more so than think-tanks like the (always kind of kooky but now deranged by woke) Manhattan Institute and the (once neocon, now with strong fascist whiffs) Heritage Foundation. BobJohnson (talk) 19:26, 29 March 2024 (UTC)

Eating the Rich becomes literal- George A. Romero's Land of the Dead

https://youtu.be/an9AnS9mKNo?si=2AZFjJncg6JfohGV

Land of the Dead is a good movie that does a great job at showing conflict between the rich and powerful vs the poor and oppressed. --Trans Fem Agenda 21:02, 29 March 2024 (UTC)

Eat the Rich is probably the best non-zombie eat-the-rich film.[20] It was probably groundbreaking insofar as the film starred a trans actor (Lanah P) in the lead role of a general-release film in 1987 (i.e., not an underground film like the Warhol oeuvre). The film didn't even really make an issue of her character also being trans, as I recall. It fared poorly by critics and the box office, but I think it actually fares well upon rewatching. Bongolian (talk) 23:11, 29 March 2024 (UTC)

The LGBTQ Grooming Conspiracy reminds me of the story The Boy Who Cried Wolf

Bigots frequently make false claims about grooming and pedophilia which leads to some believing them. If someone actually abused a bigot's kid, nobody would believe them as they claim it over and over. --Trans Fem Agenda 16:21, 21 March 2024 (UTC)

This bullshit harms real victims of grooming, as vital resources are being spent on a rehashing of the Satanic Panic. I don't think it's a coincidence that genuine abusers like the co-founder of Moms for Liberty have jumped on the groomer bandwagon. Carthage (talk) 16:28, 21 March 2024 (UTC)

Nope, me neither. Work people up into a frenzy about false pedophiles and the real pedophiles can fly under the radar. Luigifan18 (talk) 16:33, 21 March 2024 (UTC)

@Carthage That was pretty much my point. When kids actually suffer from sexual abuse, people won't believe the victim. Kinda like false rape accusations- It harms actual rape victims. --Trans Fem Agenda 22:42, 21 March 2024 (UTC)

I was watching that "Quiet on Set" documentary, about how Nickelodeon in the 90s was full of abuse. What's said needs to be taken with a grain of salt; everyone is the hero of their own story. However, Drake Bell's story was a bit interesting. Spoilers ahead, I guess. Basically, Drake Bell's parents had a nasty divorce, and his dad ended up as his manager. A pedophile began grooming Drake, and the father became suspicious. When the father went to confront someone at Nickelodeon Studios, he was told that the guy was Gay; ergo, the dad was just being Homophobic and should shut his bigoted ass up. And then Drake was indeed raped for years by that guy. CorruptUser 06:29, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

"ergo"? - Only Sort of Dumb (talk) 06:37, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

Nickelodeon's suits didn't want to know; or more correctly they saw the allegation as a 'brand image / HR problem' than one of actual illegality and protection of persons one. Therefore, the easiest way to 'deal' with it is to turn the tables, attack the accuser [in this case, the father being a homophobe due to seeing 'Boys Beware' too many times]. And as [I assume] they had contracts, they couldn't even simply walk away without being sued into eternal penury. KarmaPolice (talk) 08:44, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

We have a page for that sort of thing, y'know… Luigifan18 (talk) 14:52, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

"Ergo", wolves will often immediately declare that the boy is crying wolf. And when it comes to Hollywood, which might as well be the wolves' den... CorruptUser 07:17, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

Even just the rhetoric harms actual grooming victims. "Grooming", aside from its other meaning (hygiene), in terms of child sexual abuse was defined as "the action of attempting to form a relationship with a child or young person, with the intention of sexually assaulting them". It's kind of comparable to how "gaslighting" described an actual thing in interpersonal abuse between individuals, and was terminologically abused in such a way that it robbed the people who that niche understanding could have helped. I get where the comparisons came from (in either case), but they are generally unhelpful. The very fact that someone would rather score political points, rather than "be kind to our language", reveals that they don't care about grooming victims but rather about politics. This is not actually exclusive to the right-wing, as some of the left-wing clapback has irked me in a similar way; mirroring their abuse of the term is equally unhelpful even if they were the first ones to do it. Chillpilled (talk) 23:06, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

Grooming is actively moving an individual towards what is entirely expected of them. Gaslighting, I agree, has been incorrectly used. Gaslighting is a very specific type of lying, we extend that grooming in an Epstein/Maxwell sense is a very specific type of Grooming. As 'Gaslighting' kinda became a catch-all term for lying, grooming has become a catch-all term for the the Epstein/Maxwell end game and not just kinda.. I dunno, teaching kids how to behave? But, as we've given up the swastika to awful misuse, it's not like we're at a lack of terms to use to teach dumb as little kids how to behave. Baseless cries of 'grooming' kids are met with 'teaching' which are responded to with more baseless 'teaching and grooming' equivocation. I'd like for it to be as simple as calling it 'preparing' children, it's all the same concept. 'Preparing' does sound a little sinister, though, doesn't it? Torrent (talk) 12:37, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

Great, now I have "prepare your anus" jokes about child sex abuse stuck in my head. Luigifan18 (talk) 14:05, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

Someone defaced the Necronomicon

Apparently a book in Harvard was, in fact, bound with human skin. As a result, those heathen removed it; is nothing un-sacred anymore?! CorruptUser 05:24, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

Added to WIGO world. Spud (talk) 15:28, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

Happy Trans Day of Visibly

From the Trans Zombie Queen. --Trans Fem Agenda 15:21, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

Baltimore Bridge

So... I'm seeing a lot of conspiracy theories regarding the bridge accident. I've decided to compile them.

Theories:

1. The (White, Ukrainian, Male) pilot was a diversity hire
2. The Bridge was vaccinated
3. The Bridge knew something about Hillary

Add to them as you see fit. CorruptUser 19:55, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

Why did the bridge collapse? Because it became too woke.

Actually, perhaps surprisingly, looking in the "usual suspect" places, I'm not seeing too many conspiracy theories about this (yet). I think the worst response so far was political bullshit -- Nancy Mace on Newsmax somehow using the bridge collapse to complain about the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.[21]

This is possibly because the conspiracy subs are right now seemingly distracted by the recent raids of the homes of Sean Combs (aka P Diddy etc.) It's a "juicier" story, centering on celebrity and sexual nefariousness and other gossiped misdeeds. There's lots of fun "speculation" here. Certainly much more to conspire over compared to "huge cargo ship runs into bridge". BobJohnson (talk) 21:11, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

It is easy to call anything a conspiracy. If a dog shits in someone's yard, you could call it a conspiracy. --Trans Fem Agenda 21:19, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

I mean, I did find a Huffington Post article with some conspiracy stuff. Apparently Alex Jones did his usual wharrgarbl and predicted World War 3 or something, which isn't surprising. Maybe some obscure Twitter accounts were posting some crapola, but I'm not on Twitter, so I can't tell if The Huff was nutpicking. Or if the Twitter accounts were bot / paid poster type bullshit, which is common enough in those parts. (An account called "Deez Nuts News"... really?)

Zero Hedge seems to think it was a terrorist attack and seems to use a non-sequitur website to try to imply something Ukraine. So I assume that other Putin-embraced media might play a similar card. BobJohnson (talk) 21:37, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

Twitter's got plenty of that going on. Before noon, I already saw plenty of claims that it was somehow a deliberate act and already declaring a coverup in the works. Seen claims that this was made as a distraction to the Sean Combs raid carried out by the pedophile overlords. Another claim that Israel did it in the wake of the recent cease-fire resolution. Andrew Tate clamed from his jail cell that it was some sort of cyberattack and was retweeted by Catturd and Alex Jones. After all that, I had to turn off retweets before I fed the bad parts of my brain with more conspiracy garbage and right wing rot. Paul S (talk) 21:48, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

It's strange to think that Elon Musk may have turned portions of Twitter into something actually worse than 4chan! (I mean, 4chan had a lot of garbage, but not too much on the bridge when I checked).

patriots.win (for the MAGA conspiracy nuts check) also didn't even have a lot. Though (true to form) they did have a thread that complained that Synergy Marine Group (the company that owned the ship) had become too woke. I mean, oh noes, the crew on board the ship was all Indian! (Sorry, Zero Hedge baseless Putin-promoted Ukraine captain conspiracy. Of course, an all Indian crew sailing a ship to Colombo, Sri Lanka makes quite a bit of sense to anyone with half a brain...) BobJohnson (talk) 23:02, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

Welp, Andrew Tate weighed in. Black Swan my arse, the law of averages says somebody would fall asleep at the wheel at some point. Luigifan18 (talk) 03:14, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

man, we've really come so far that a disaster claiming lives as it happens is quick fodder for jokes. Poor taste, western world. Obviously, it was the Orientals. Torrent (talk) 08:50, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

How long before 'Galloping Gertie' gets co-opted? Anna Livia (talk) 23:32, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

Why do they still let Taint have an internet connection? Carthage (talk) 17:20, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

"The Bridge was vaccinated"

So, you take a syringe and put it inside of a steelbar...? How do you even vaccinate a bridge? Bongolian (talk) 20:08, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

Israel's ethnic cleansing idea for Gaza Strip

I am sure that many of you are aware of the far right Israeli government wants to ethnically cleanse Gaza Strip for "security reasons".

I am certain that this would just increase the violence. Hezbollah would likely intervene and cause further chaos. --Trans Fem Agenda 21:28, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

Since when did the far-right think any further than jerking off their hate-boners? Fascists' "solutions" being worse than their "problems" is nothing new. Luigifan18 (talk) 21:53, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

I guess that I was stating the obvious. I hope that the Israeli government is proud of themselves. They have no qualms about endangering their own population by inflaming the conflict to where third party actors join. --Trans Fem Agenda 22:15, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

This has been their dreams since at least 1948; a enlarged 'Greater Israel' within which all Muslims/Palestinians are expelled entirely, the Dome of the Rock demolished and replaced with the 'Third Temple' and so on [basically, their own 'from the River to the Sea' chant]. Now, it cannot be denied that they have to date got some of their dreams [just compare what proto-Israel was offered by the UN in '47 and what they have now] but the price for it is becoming ever-higher [for both Palestinians and Israelis]. KarmaPolice (talk) 22:35, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

With the brutal apartheid system that Palestinians get, Israel somehow wonders why there is the formation of militant groups. I feel bad for Israeli civilians killed in the conflict but I don't feel bad for the Israeli government. Reap what you sow. I feel bad for anyone caught in the crossfire. That is the price of religious nationalism. --Trans Fem Agenda 23:39, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

That's the price of religious nationalism? Not your people going full moron and losing all semblance of accurate perspective of reality and problem-solving skills? Luigifan18 (talk) 00:02, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

Anti-intellectualism is the base of religious nationalism. Actually the base of any authoritarianism. --Trans Fem Agenda 00:55, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

Look at Nagorno-Karabakh or Bhutan for what actual ethnic cleansing is. For whatever reason (OK, we all know why), no one has seen fit to raise the plight of Armenians or the Lhotsampa. If a homophobic terrorist organization (that's pretty remarkably anti-intellectual) running a territory was holding 130 hostages, what country wouldn't have a military response? Terms have meanings. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 01:00, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

I think it is fair to say that Jewish supremacist extremists such as Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich have advocated such. (Though of course they do not use those exact words, but the rhetoric and desired actions are in line with a desire to ethnically cleanse Gaza.) Now, the rhetoric of these two and other extremist settlers are quite appalling to a *lot* in Israel, to say the least (certainly much of the opposition), so it is *not* fair IMHO to say that the entire government actually wants to ethnically cleanse IMHO (I cannot recall even Netanyahu using this sort of rhetoric). The problem here is that Netanyahu needs the support of these extremist yahoos to stay in power. BobJohnson (talk) 01:18, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

So collective punishment, a war crime, is the appropriate (and effective) response here, and not guaranteed to force generate for Hamas? The Gaza Strip is also under belligerent military occupation. Before October 7th Hamas still didn't control the air, sea, or land borders of Gaza. Your claim that Gaza is a sovereign territory free of occupation is yet another mindless Zionist PRATT you are so keen to reiterate. It's also questionable that a military response is the most effective solution to dealing with the hostages, especially as the IDF are killing everything in sight and have already proven themselves to be a danger to the hostages. Hell, the hostages' families are pissed with Bibi for not instituting a ceasefire. Carthage (talk) 03:00, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

Yes, entirely agreed on that. I have no idea what Israel was thinking re-electing Netanyahu, he has long established that he's going for the record for corruption on multiple fronts. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 01:30, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

Something something incumbent advantage something something better the devil you know. (I make no claims of being a political scientist.) Luigifan18 (talk) 03:20, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ The claim that Israel isn't committing ethnic cleansing is obvious bullshit. Plans to "resettle Gaza" have even entered the mainstream of Israeli discourse. How do you think they're gonna "resettle" Gaza? With the consent of the local population and without forced population transfers? Carthage (talk) 02:50, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

Consider the source, then get back to me on what's bullshit. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 03:32, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

When Israeli officials speak the way they do, it's not an accusation out of nowhere. The only one I remember seeing a reprisal for was the culture minister Eliyahu, as he was suspended after he suggested nuking Gaza. There were quite a few comments like this by Israeli politicians including high ranking ones, and if I recall they may have been compiled by the South Africans when they presented their case to the ICJ. Chillpilled (talk) 12:40, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

Don't vote for Genocide Joe. Fuck that man! Ψ (talk) 13:31, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

Which means Netanyahu chum Donald Trump wins? Smart plan, Lou.

The Democrat coalition is a "big tent" party and they are not going to quickly turn their back on what once was a solid ally (historically support for Israel was bipartisan and rarely questioned in *both* parties). Particularly since "all in on Gaza" so far has not been a *huge* big vote-winner in the Democrat primaries. (Are there any examples, actually? Can't think of any at the moment.)

The Biden administration has taken a few political "baby steps" (eg actually blacklisting some extremist Jewish settlers, and abstaining in a recent UN resolution) since I'm sure they know there's some anger at the Netanyahu administration among progressives and Muslim-Americans. I don't know it's enough for some hardliners, it probably isn't. From my perspective, though, I wonder if some of these people have completely forgotten about the atrocities Hamas committed last October when raging about Israel. In general, I don't think the "big tent" electorate is all in on Gaza, and many (particularly the reformist Jews within the Democrat coalition) might have a more nuanced view of Israel compared to those swinging around words like "genocide" carelessly. Which is why rage at Israel has not moved the needle much in primaries. (Contrast this to, say, abortion, where in Alabama, a recent Democrat state House campaign in Huntsville focused on IVF and abortion, and ended up netting a 34 point swing from the last election in the Democrat favor. That's an issue with "legs.") BobJohnson (talk) 14:01, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

You act as if October 7th justifies Israel's own atrocities. It doesn't. Carthage (talk) 14:14, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

You've missed the point of what Bob is saying. Plus, while they don't justify Israel's own actions, leftist have been terrible about showing any empathy for the victims of that atrocity if they even believe there was a massacre at all [22] [23].-Ryan1257 (talk) 14:35, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

Israel and Israel apologists consistently bring up October 7th to justify Israel's crimes against humanity, so it is very much relevant that we dispel any notion that October 7th justifies Israel's crimes.

Also, while there is undoubtedly an antisemitic element to opposition to Israel, it would be a strawman (which you are doing) to paint the entirety of leftist antizionism as being antisemitic, especially when there is a significant Jewish antizionist movement, which you are completely ignoring. The victims of October 7th have people who speak for them, but Palestinian humanity is constantly conditioned. There is a clear double standard here. Who speaks for Palestine? The people who do constantly get smeared as antisemitic even when they are Jewish. Carthage (talk) 14:46, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

I wasn't painting the entirety of leftist antizionism as antisemitism, I was just showing how tolerated it is for "solidarity with Palestine".-Ryan1257 (talk) 14:52, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

I don't like swinging around hardbaked definitions and trying to force real world events into meanings of words. It's a vibe thing. When those food trucks were attacked, I believe calling it a "genocide" is reasonable. Or was that 112 counts of homicide? Or here, blocking trucks to an area "on the verge of famine". What is that gonna be? Is Hamas going to win the war because maybe some of their people get hands on humanitarian aid? So now we're gonna starve the entire population? I don't really care about what words are used to describe the events in Gaza, but it's vile, alright.

About showing empathy for the victims of Hamas: Yes, as far as I am concerned, I do. Nobody deserves to be raped and/or killed. That's a traumatic event changing your and the lifes of your relatives forever, potentially ruining it. But what is your problem with this now? That "leftists" haven't whined about this (Hamas crimes) enough? That media outlets aren't whining about this any longer? They already gave Hamas atrocities overproportional coverage and bias, and you now want us to bring this up "for context" every time Israel continues to do shit, five months later, to relativize their actions? That's a pet peeve one could get behind, I guess, but is not at all useful right now. ULTRACOMFY (talk) 14:53, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

I am certainly am quite pissed about Netanyahu's horrific hardline approach, and especially the extremists he has aligned with (who should really know better; forgive the Godwin, but IMHO you can legitimately compare some of the extremist settler shit with the culture of Nazi Germany honestly, which is fucking ironic). What I am giving is a political answer on why Joe Biden is moving in "baby steps" on Israel, which actually (from a perspective of decades of looking at politics) is pretty significant considering how untouchable Israel / AIPAC was during my life. My only point is that: A) Politically, going all-in on Gaza is not a winner right now; B) IMHO, those who demonize Israel while forgetting about Hamas are making a mistake, and C) Donald Trump is most likely going to be much worse on this issue given his past chumminess with the Israel right (along with his multiple denigration of Muslims). BobJohnson (talk) 15:14, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

Had Israel actually been careful in fighting Hamas and had actual humanitarian zones set up then I would not say anything about it. If Hamas was destroyed I would not lose sleep over it. I feel bad for all civilians who lost their lives due to senseless war. --Trans Fem Agenda`

People act like there's no precedent for holding Israel accountable, but even Ronald fucking Raygun has brought Israel to task in the past: [24] Carthage (talk) 20:15, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

I personally think Biden is playing 'cakeism' with Gaza; on one hand allowing a series of semi-official 'finger-wags' about it but then repeatly bypasses Congress on arms sales by breaking them up all into penny-packets so they don't meet the threshold. Like most people, I pay a butt-load more attention to what is done rather than what is said. KarmaPolice (talk) 22:01, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

It does amaze me how the official government policy is to back a two state solution while supporting the thing that is a big obstacle to a two state solution. --Trans Fem Agenda 22:47, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

The machine of a democratic republic works, when it works at all, as it was designed to work. The Jewish population in the US is roughly 45 times the size of the American Palestinian population. UncleKrampus (talk) 20:50, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

You do realize that support for Israel is not as unanimous among American Jews as it used to be, right? You are also completely ignoring the effects that lobby groups like AIPAC have on the exercise of policy. Carthage (talk) 20:54, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

I cannot be said to ignore that which I have not been asked to discuss. The numbers are the numbers.UncleKrampus (talk) 21:00, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

Why bring the numbers up then? You were implying that Jewish Americans overwhelmingly support Israel in its current form, yet this is not the case. If anything, the numbers show that "the machinery of a democratic republic" is not working as intended, if we are to assume the American political system is genuinely democratic. Conversely, if the US is a civil oligarchy where focus groups and lobbyists have more influence on policy than public opinion, then the machinery of an oligarchic republic is working exactly as intended. Carthage (talk) 02:41, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ Three days ago the United Nations published A/HRC/55/73, a Special Rapporteur commissioned by the Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner (OHCHR), and to put it bluntly, it is absolutely disastrous. The report makes a case with no reservations that Israel is engaging in unambiguous, egregious genocide. I will admit that I haven't looked into the Israel Palestine drama ever, not even very much in the last five months, but what I am looking at here in this report makes your blood chill. I strongly encourage you to read into it yourself, it's not overwhelmingly long and it's surprisingly straightforward in the way it presents its case. ULTRACOMFY (talk) 21:21, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

The special report is, as is always the case, someone's opinion. The American Jewish Committee says it is not true. I can't tell from here, but I believe a lot of people are dying who ought not be dying. You don't need fancy words to say that.UncleKrampus (talk) 18:20, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

I feel like a statement like that is only expressed in effort to make some international law scholar cringe. It’s not just “someone’s opinion” if a representative of a international body identifies multiple human rights violations as specified by their charter that multiple nations have agreed to uphold.

A Special Rapporteur is an appointed expert on the subject. Violations of UN declarations *can* be enforceable by international law. This is not simply “someone’s opinion”. That’s not how reports from officially and internationally recognized human rights councils work. - Only Sort of Dumb (talk) 00:03, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

It should also be said that AJC isn’t a relevant authority in this context, given it is NOT an international legal body — and has no authority to declare whether or not the rights listed in the UN’s declaration has been violated or not. That’s for the UN to decide. - Only Sort of Dumb (talk) 00:27, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

It’s also a weird advocacy organization to cite considering how they responded to the holocaust and openly discouraged allowing Jewish refugees from Germany into the US. - Only Sort of Dumb (talk)

@BobJohnson Genocide Joe is openly gifting weapons to Israel. I refuse to believe in "baby steps" other than ending the war in Gaza. He doesn't even do red lines aganist Israel. Donald Trump is no different to Joe Biden here. Ψ (talk) 08:59, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

There are so many fallacies here it is difficult to believe there is any hope for understanding. Other people's "authorities" are just that. Thus is human nature. War is a breaking of civilized conventions. The the second world war in Germany resulted, by some estimates, in 500,000 civilian deaths, mostly due to allied bombings. There was not much sympathy for Germans in America at that time. War is awful. It hasn't changed much. It really doesn't matter what I believe about war. Go ahead and blame Biden. See what good it will do.UncleKrampus (talk) 14:53, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

The Israeli leadership are openingly saying that they want to kill civilians in Gaza and kick them all to Egypt. Its a deeply evil war. https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/02/26/israel-not-complying-world-court-order-genocide-case Ψ (talk) 02:17, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

That's a false equivalency, as the Allies didn't go to war against Germany with the intention of driving the Germans out of Germany. Carthage (talk) 11:31, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

Before reading your comment about how they responded to refugees, I was going to bring up how the AJC abstained from the 1933 anti-Nazi boycott. I had no idea they were against taking in Jewish refugees, which feels more significant. It seems there was a split between German Jews, including Jewish-Americans of Jewish-German descent, who tended to be more conservative and to have arrived in America much earlier, also being much less numerous, and those who were descended from eastern Europe. Which may have, my speculation, been where that split on questions of refugees or boycotts stemmed from, aside from other known causes such as political pragmatism, with some believing these stances would ultimately keep antisemitic prejudice from rising in their localities. I doubt this split has been retained into the present day very much, but who knows. It was also the case in Germany itself, where the pro-Nazi "Association of German National Jews" tried to portray themselves as the "good ones" while eastern European Jews were meant to be the "bad ones". Chillpilled (talk) 12:15, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

How people, organizations responded 80 years ago is interesting, but not really relevant to today. War is deeply evil. Americans went to war with the stated intention of getting rid of Nazism, that is, exterminating it, which they went ahead and did. UncleKrampus (talk) 14:19, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

That's still a false equivalency. The Nazis were not the German people. Carthage (talk) 14:38, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

What a weak argument. "But they are different!" It is always possible to find differences in non-identical events. The Nazis were supported by the German people. You are right. It isn't exactly the same. It never is. UncleKrampus (talk) 14:53, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

"What a weak argument." You're the one using the piss poor analogy to trivialize crimes against humanity. Is this really your only defense when the holes in your own arguments are exposed? You bring up numbers, then when the numbers are shown to contradict your claim you claim the numbers are irrelevant. Now this. To hammer the nail in as to how stupid an analogy this is: the war against Germany was a conventional war against a nation state. The war against Palestine is an unconventional war. Insurgencies typically grow stronger the more atrocities are committed against the population the insurgency grows out of. World War II is not at all comparable to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Germany was also an aggressor power, and even after occupation the Allies did not claim to "own" the land Germany sat upon. Israel claims that there is no Palestinian state, and that they are the rightful owners of the Palestinian land. Israel's aim is to remove the Palestinian presence from Palestine. You know this, but you defend the indefensible anyways. Carthage (talk) 15:06, 1 April 2024 (UTC)